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ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Globe Theatre . . . . . Frontispiece 

Elizabeth Hawking .... Facing page 20 

A Puritan Family " " 36 

Haymaking " " 50 

A Supper Party " "60 

Velvet Breeches and Cloth 

Breeches " " 76 

The Swan Theatre .... " " 96 

A Family Group " no 

Charlecote Hall " n 130 

The Bellman of London . . " " 146 

William Kemp Dancing ... " " 160 

An English Printing-office . "176 



The People 

for whom 

Shakespeare Wrote 



BY 



Charles Dudley Warner 



ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK 
HARPER &* BROTHERS 

MDCCCXCVII 



( JUJ 



V* 






f 



By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. 



THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE. Post 8vo, 
Cloth, $i 50. 

THE GOLDEN HOUSE. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Half Leather, 

$2 00. 

A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE WORLD. A Novel. Post 
8vo, Half Leather, $1 50 ; Paper, 75 cents. 

THEIR PILGRIMAGE. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Half Leather, 

$2 00. 

STUDIES IN THE SOUTH AND WEST. Post 8vo, Half 
Leather, $1 75. 

OUR ITALY. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. 

AS WE GO. With Portrait and Illustrations. i6mo, Cloth, $1 00. 

AS WE WERE SAYING. With Portrait and Illustrations. 
i6mo, Cloth, $1 00. 

THE WORK OF WASHINGTON IRVING. With Portraits. 
32mo, Cloth, 50 cents. 

Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 



COPYRIGHT, l8g7, BY 
HARPER AND BROTHERS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



PREFACE 

THE first two chapters of these stud- 
ies of the people for whom Shakespeare 
wrote were printed in the Atlantic Month- 
ly, and permission to reproduce them 
here is kindly given by Messrs. Hough- 
ton, Mifflin & Co. The last two are 
from a MS. written subsequently, to il- 
lustrate the relation of English life in 
the times of Elizabeth to its literature. 
The last two traverse, therefore, some- 
thing of the same ground as the first, 
and the reader may perceive some repe- 
titions. It is thought best, however, to 
let them remain, rather than to destroy 
the structure of the second part of this 



PREFACE 

little volume. With this explanation, 
which will advise the reader of one of 
the things he is to criticise, the study is 
respectfully submitted to an over-kind 
public. 

C. D. W. 

Hartford, June i, 1897. 



The People 

for whom 

Shakespeare Wrote 



CHAPTER I 

Queen Elizabeth being dead about 
ten o'clock in the morning, March 24, 
1603, Sir Robert Cary posted away, un- 
sent, to King James of Scotland to in- 
form him of the "accident"; and got 
made a baron of the realm for his ride. 
On his way down to take possession 
of his new kingdom the king distribu- 
ted the honor of knighthood right and 
left liberally ; at Theobald's he created 
eight-and-twenty knights, of whom Sir 
Richard Baker, afterwards the author 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

of "A Chronicle of the Kings of Eng- 
land," was one. " God knows how many 
hundreds he made the first year," says 
the chronicler, " but it was indeed fit 
to give vent to the passage of Honour, 
which during Queen Elizabeth's reign 
had been so stopped that scarce any 
county of England had knights enow 
to make a jury." 

Sir Richard Baker was born in 1568, 
and died in 1645; his " Chronicle" ap- 
peared in 1 641. It was brought down 
to the death of James in 1625, when, he 
having written the introduction to the 
life of Charles I., the storm of the sea- 
son caused him to " break off in amaze- 
ment," for he had thought the race of 
"Stewards" likely to continue to the 
" world's end " ; and he never resumed 
his pen. In the reign of James two 
things lost their lustre — the exercise of 
tilting, which Elizabeth made a special 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

solemnity, and the band of Yeomen of 
the Guard, choicest persons both for stat- 
ure and other good parts, who graced 
the court of Elizabeth; James " was so 
intentive to Realities that he little re- 
garded shows," and in his time these 
came utterly to be neglected. The virgin 
queen was the last ruler who seriously 
regarded the pomps and splendors of 
feudalism. 

It was characteristic of the age that 
the death of James, which occurred in 
his fifty-ninth year, should have been 
by rumor attributed to "poyson"; but 
" being dead, and his body opened, there 
was no sign at all of poyson, his inward 
parts being all sound, but that his Spleen 
was a little faulty, which might be cause 
enough to cast him into an Ague : the 
ordinary high - way, especially in old 
bodies, to a natural death." 

The chronicler records among the 
3 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

men of note of James's time Sir Francis 
Vere, " who as another Hannibal, with 
his one eye, could see more in the Mar- 
tial Discipline than common men can do 
with two "; Sir Edward Coke ; Sir Fran- 
cis Bacon, " who besides his profounder 
book, of Novum Organum, hath written 
the reign of King Henry the Seventh, 
in so sweet a style, that like Manna, it 
pleaseth the tast of all palats "; Will- 
iam Camden, whose Description of Brit- 
ain " seems to keep Queen Elizabeth 
alive after death"; " and to speak it in 
a word, the Trojan Horse was not fuller 
of Heroick Grecians, than King James 
his Reign was full of men excellent in 
all kindes of Learning." Among these 
was an old university acquaintance of 
Baker's, " Mr. John Dunne, who leav- 
ing Oxford, lived at the Innes of Court, 
not dissolute, but very neat ; a great 
Visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter 

4 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

of Playes, a great writer of conceited 
Verses ; until such times as King James 
taking notice of the pregnancy of his 
Wit, was a means that he betook him 
to the study of Divinity, and thereupon 
proceeding Doctor, was made Dean of 
Pauls ; and became so rare a Preacher, 
that he was not only commended, but 
even admired by all who heard him." 

The times of Elizabeth and James 
were visited by some awful casualties 
and portents. From December, 1602, to 
the December following, the plague de- 
stroyed 30,518 persons in London; the 
same disease that in the sixth year of 
Elizabeth killed 20,500, and in the 
thirty-sixth year 17,890, besides the lord 
mayor and three aldermen. In Jan- 
uary, 1606, a mighty whale came up the 
Thames within eight miles of London, 
whose body, seen divers times above 
water, was judged to be longer than the 

5 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

largest ship on the river ; " but when she 
tasted the fresh water and scented the 
Land, she returned into the sea." Not 
so fortunate was a vast whale cast upon 
the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, in 1575, 
which was " twenty Ells long, and thir- 
teen foot broad from the belly to the 
backbone, and eleven foot between the 
eyes. One of his eyes being taken out 
of his head was more than a cart with 
six horses could draw; the Oyl being 
boyled out of his head was Parmacit- 
tee." Nor the monstrous fish cast ashore 
in Lincolnshire in 1564, which measured 
six yards between the eyes and had a tail 
fifteen feet broad ; " twelve men stood 
upright in his mouth to get the Oyl." 
In 1612 a comet appeared, which in the 
opinion of Dr. Bainbridge, the great 
mathematician of Oxford, was as far 
above the moon as the moon is above 
the earth, and the sequel of it was that 

6 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

infinite slaughters and devastations fol- 
lowed it both in Germany and other coun- 
tries. In 1613, in Standish, in Lanca- 
shire, a maiden child was born having 
four legs, four arms, and one head with 
two faces — the one before, the other be- 
hind, like the picture of Janus. (One 
thinks of the prodigies that presaged 
the birth of Glendower.) Also, the same 
year, in Hampshire, a carpenter, lying 
in bed with his wife and a young child, 
" was himself and the childe both burned 
to death with a sudden lightning, no 
fire appearing outwardly upon him, and 
yet lay burning for the space of almost 
three days till he was quite consumed to 
ashes." This year the Globe playhouse, 
on the Bankside, was burned, and the 
year following the new playhouse, the 
Fortune, in Golding Lane, " was by neg- 
ligence of a candle, clean burned down 
to the ground." In this year also, 1614, 

7 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

the town of Stratford -on -Avon was 
burned. One of the strangest events, 
however, happened in the first year 
of Elizabeth (1558), when " dyed Sir 
Thomas Cheney, Lord Warden of the 
Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for 
a certain, that his pulse did beat more 
than three quarters of an hour after he 
was dead, as strongly as if he had been 
still alive." In 1580 a strange appari- 
tion happened in Somersetshire — three 
score personages all clothed in black, a 
furlong in distance from those that be- 
held them ; " and after their appearing, 
and a little while tarrying, they van- 
ished away, but immediately another 
strange company, in like manner, color, 
and number appeared in the same place, 
and they encountered one another and 
so vanished away. And the third time 
appeared that number again, all in bright 
armour, and encountered one another, 

8 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

and so vanished away. This was ex- 
amined before Sir George Norton, and 
sworn by four honest men that saw it, 
to be true." Equally well substantiated, 
probably, was what happened in Here- 
fordshire in 1 571 : "A field of three 
acres, in Blackmore, with the Trees 
and Fences, moved from its place and 
passed over another field, travelling in 
the highway that goeth to Heme, and 
there stayed." Herefordshire was a fa- 
vorite place for this sort of exercise of 
nature. In 1575 the little town of Kin- 
naston was visited by an earthquake : 
" On the seventeenth of February at six 
o'clock of the evening, the earth began 
to open and a Hill with a Rock under it 
(making at first a great bellowing noise, 
which was heard a great way off) lifted 
itself up a great height, and began to 
travel, bearing along with it the Trees 
that grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and 

9 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the 
same time. In the place from whence 
it was first moved, it left a gaping dis- 
tance forty foot broad, and forescore Ells 
long ; the whole Field was about twen- 
ty Acres. Passing along, it overthrew a 
Chappell standing in the way, removed 
an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, 
from the West into the East ; with the 
like force it thrust before it High-wayes, 
Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made 
Tilled ground Pasture, and again turned 
Pasture into Tillage. Having walked 
in this sort from Saturday in the even- 
ing, till Monday noon, it then stood 
still." It seems not improbable that 
Birnam wood should come to Dunsi- 
nane. 

It was for an age of faith, for a people 
whose credulity was fed on such prodi- 
gies and whose imagination glowed at 
such wonderful portents, that Shake- 

IO 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

speare wrote, weaving into the realities 
of sense those awful mysteries of the 
supernatural which hovered not far away 
from every Englishman of his time. 

Shakespeare was born in 1564, when 
Elizabeth had been six years on the 
throne, and he died in 1616, nine years 
before James I., of the faulty spleen, 
was carried to the royal chapel in West- 
minster, " with great solemnity, but with 
greater lamentation." Old Baker, who 
says of himself that he was the unwor- 
thiest of the knights made at Theobald's, 
condescends to mention William Shake- 
speare at the tail end of the men of note 
of Elizabeth's time. The ocean is not 
more boundless, he affirms, than the 
number of men of note of her time ; and 
after he has finished with the statesmen 
(" an exquisite statesman for his own 
ends was Robert Earl of Leicester, and 
for his Countries good, Sir William Ce- 

11 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

till, Lord Burleigh"), the seamen, the 
great commanders, the learned gentle- 
men and writers (among them Roger 
Askam, who had sometime been school- 
master to Queen Elizabeth, but, taking 
too great delight in gaming and cock- 
fighting, lived and died in mean estate), 
the learned divines and preachers, he 
concludes: " After such men, it might 
be thought ridiculous to speak of Stage- 
players ; but seeing excellency in the 
meanest things deserve remembring, 
and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in 
History with such commendation, it may 
be allowed us to do the like with some 
of our Nation. Richard Bourbidge and 
Edward Allen, two such actors as no 
age must ever look to see the like ; and 
to make their Comedies compleat, Rich- 
ard Tarleton, who for the Part called 
the Clowns Part, never had his match, 
never will have. For Writers of Playes, 

12 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

and such as have been players them- 
selves, William Shakespeare and Ben- 
jamin Johnson have especially left their 
Names recommended to posterity." 

Richard Bourbidge (or Burbadge) was 
the first of the great English tragic ac- 
tors, and was the original of the great- 
er number of Shakespeare's heroes — 
Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Mac- 
beth, Richard III., Romeo, Brutus, etc. 
Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged 
scapegraces of social life, was regarded 
by his contemporaries as the most witty 
of clowns and comedians. The clown 
was a permitted character in the old 
theatres, and intruded not only between 
the acts, but even into the play itself, 
with his quips and antics. It is prob- 
able that he played the part of clown, 
grave-digger, etc., in Shakespeare's com- '" 
edies, and no doubt took liberties with 
his parts. It is thought that part of 

13 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Hamlet's advice to the players — " and 
let those that play your clowns speak no 
more than is set down for them," etc. — 
was levelled at Tarleton. 

The question is often asked, but I 
consider it an idle one, whether Shake- 
speare was appreciated in his own day 
as he is now. That the age was unable 
to separate him from itself, and see his 
great stature, is probable ; that it en- 
joyed him with a sympathy to which we 
are strangers there is no doubt. To us 
he is inexhaustible. The more we study 
him, the more are we astonished at his 
multiform genius. In our complex civ- 
ilization, there is no development of pas- 
sion, or character, or trait of human nat- 
ure, no social evolution, that does not 
find expression somewhere in those mar- 
vellous plays ; and yet it is impossible 
for us to enter into a full, sympathetic 
enjoyment of those plays unless we can 
14 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

in some measure recreate for ourselves 
the atmosphere in which they were writ- 
ten. To superficial observation great 
geniuses come into the world at rare 
intervals in history, in a manner inde- 
pendent of what we call the progress of 
the race. It may be so ; but the form 
the genius shall take is always deter- 
mined by the age in which it appears, 
and its expression is shaped by the en- 
vironments. Acquaintance with the 
Bedouin desert life of to-day, which 
has changed little for three thousand 
years, illumines the book of Job like an 
electric light. Modern research into 
Hellenic and Asiatic life has given a 
new meaning to the Iliad and the Odys- 
sey, and greatly enhanced our enjoy- 
ment of them. A fair comprehension of 
the Divina Commedia is impossible with- 
out some knowledge of the factions that 
rent Florence ; of the wars of Guelf and 

15 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Ghibelline; of the spirit that banished 
Dante, and gave him an humble tomb 
in Ravenna instead of a sepulchre in the 
pantheon of Santa Croce. Shakespeare 
was a child of his age ; it had long been 
preparing for him ; its expression culmi- 
nated in him. It was essentially a dra- 
matic age. He used the accumulated 
materials of centuries. He was play- 
wright as well as poet. His variety and 
multiform genius cannot otherwise be 
accounted for. He called in the coin- 
age of many generations, and reissued it 
purified and unalloyed, stamped in his 
own mint. There was a Hamlet prob- 
ably, there were certainly Romeos and 
Juliets, on the stage before Shakespeare. 
In him were received the imaginations, 
the inventions, the aspirations, the su- 
perstitions, the humors, the supernat- 
ural intimations ; in him met the con- 
verging rays of the genius of his age, as 
16 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

in a lens, to be sent onward thenceforth 
in an ever-broadening stream of light. 

It was his fortune to live not only in 
a dramatic age, but in a transition age, 
when feudalism was passing away, but 
while its shows and splendors could still 
be seriously comprehended. The dignity 
that doth hedge a king was so far abat- 
ed that royalty could be put upon the 
stage as a player's spectacle ; but the 
reality of kings and queens and court 
pageantry was not so far past that it 
did not appeal powerfully to the imag- 
inations of the frequenters of the Globe, 
the Rose, and the Fortune. They had 
no such feeling as we have in regard to 
the pasteboard kings and queens who 
strut their brief hour before us in ana- 
chronic absurdity. 

But, besides that he wrote in the 

spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in 

the language and the literary methods 
b 17 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

of his time. This is not more evident 
in the contemporary poets than in the 
chroniclers of that day. They all de- 
lighted in ingenuities of phrase, in neat 
turns and conceits; it was a compliment 
then to be called a " conceited" writer. 

Of all the guides to Shakespeare's 
time, there is none more profitable or 
entertaining than William Harrison, 
who wrote for Holinshed's chronicle 
" The Description of England," as it 
fell under his eyes from 1577 to 1587. 
Harrison's England is an unfailing mine 
of information for all the historians of 
the sixteenth century ; and in the edi- 
tion published by the New Shakespeare 
Society, and edited, with a wealth of 
notes and contemporary references, by 
Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall, it is a new 
revelation of Shakespeare's England to 
the general reader. 

Harrison himself is an interesting 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

character, and trustworthy above the 
general race' of chroniclers. He was 
born in 1534, or, to use his exactness 
of statement, "upon the 18th of April, 
hora 11, minut 4, Secunde 56, at Lon- 
don, in Cordwainer streete, otherwise 
called bowe-lane." This year was also 
remarkable as that in which " King 
Henry 8 polleth his head ; after whom 
his household and nobility, with the rest 
of his subjects do the like." It was the 
year before Anne Boleyn, haled away 
to the Tower, accused, condemned, and 
executed in the space of fourteen days, 
" with sigheingteares" said to the rough 
Duke of Norfolk, " Hither I came once 
my lord, to fetch a crown imperial; but 
now to receive, I hope, a crown im- 
mortal." In 1544, the boy was at St. 
Paul's school ; the litany in the English 
tongue, by the king's command, was 
that year sung openly in St. Paul's, and 

19 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

we have a glimpse of Harrison with the 
other children, enforced to buy those 
books, walking in general procession, as 
was appointed, before the king went to 
Boulogne. Harrison was a student at 
both Oxford and Cambridge, taking the 
degree of bachelor of divinity at the 
latter in 1569, when he had been an 
Oxford M.A. of seven years' standing. 
Before this he was household chaplain 
to Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, 
who gave him, in 1588-89, the rectory 
of Radwinter, in Essex, which he held 
till his death, in 1593. In 1586 he was 
installed canon of Windsor. Between 
1559 and 1 571 he married Marion Ise- 
brande, of whom he said in his will, 
referring to the sometime supposed un- 
lawfulness of priests' marriages, " by the 
laws of God I take and repute in all 
respects for my true and lawful wife." 
At Radwinter, the old parson, working 

20 




ELIZABETH HAWKING 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

in his garden, collected Roman coins, 
wrote his chronicles, and expressed his 
mind about the rascally lawyers of Es- 
sex, to whom flowed all the wealth of 
the land. The lawyers in those days ; 
stirred up contentions, and then reaped 
the profits. " Of all that ever I knew 
in Essex," says Harrison, " Denis and 
Mainford excelled, till John of Ludlow, 
alias Mason, came in place, unto whom 
in comparison these two were but chil- 
dren." This last did so harry a client 
for four years that the latter, still called 
upon for new fees, " went to bed, and 
within four days made an end of his 
woeful life, even with care and pensive- 
ness." And after his death the lawyer 
so handled his son " that there was 
never sheep shorn in May, so near 
clipped of his fleece present, as he was 
of many to come." The Welsh were 
the most litigious people. A Welsh- 

21 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

man would walk up to London bare- 
legged, carrying his hose on his neck, 
to save wear and because he had no 
change, importune his countrymen till 
he got half a dozen writs, with which he 
would return to molest his neighbors, 
though no one of his quarrels was worth 
the money he paid for a single writ. 

The humblest mechanic of England 
to-day has comforts and conveniences 
which the richest nobles lacked in Har- 
rison's day, but it was nevertheless an 
age of great luxury and extravagance ; 
of brave apparel, costly and showy be- 
yond that of any Continental people, 
though wanting in refined taste ; and of 
mighty banquets, with service of mas- 
sive plate, troops of attendants, and a 
surfeit of rich food and strong drink. 

In this luxury the clergy of Harrison's 
rank did not share. Harrison was poor 
on forty pounds a year. He complains 

22 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

that the clergy were taxed more than 
ever, the church having become "an 
ass whereon every man is to ride to mar- 
ket and cast his wallet." They paid 
tenths and first-fruits and subsidies, so 
that out of twenty pounds of a bene- 
fice the incumbent did not reserve more 
than £13 6s. Sd. for himself and his fam- 
ily. They had to pay for both prince 
and laity, and both grumbled at and 
slandered them. Harrison gives a good 
account of the higher clergy; he says 
the bishops were loved for their pain- 
ful diligence in their calling, and that 
the clergy of England were reputed on 
the Continent as learned divines, skil- 
ful in Greek and Hebrew and in the 
Latin tongue. There was, however, a 
scarcity of preachers and ministers in 
Elizabeth's time, and their character 
was not generally high. What could be 
expected when covetous patrons can- 

23 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

celled their debts to their servants by 
bestowing advowsons of benefices upon 
their bakers, butlers, cooks, grooms, 
pages, and lackeys — when even in the 
universities there was cheating at elec- 
tions for scholarships and fellowships, 
and gifts were for sale ! The morals of 
the clergy were, however, improved by 
frequent conferences, at which the good 
were praised and the bad reproved ; and 
these conferences were " a notable spur 
unto all the ministers, whereby to ap- 
ply their books, which otherwise (as in 
times past) would give themselves to 
hawking, hunting, tables, cards, dice, 
tipling at the ale house, shooting, and 
other like vanities." The clergy held 
a social rank with tradespeople ; their 
sons learned trades, and their daughters 
might go out to service. Jewell says 
many of them were the " basest sort 
of people " — unlearned, fiddlers, pipers, 

24 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

and what not. " Not a few," says Har- 
rison, " find fault with our thread-bare 
gowns, as if not our patrons but our 
wives were the causes of our woe." He 
thinks the ministers will be better when 
the patrons are better, and he defends 
the right of the clergy to marry and to 
leave their goods, if they have any, to 
their widows and children instead of to 
the church, or to some school or alms- 
house. What if their wives are fond, 
after the decease of their husbands, to 
bestow themselves not so advisedly as 
their calling requireth ; do not duch- 
esses, countesses, and knights' wives 
offend in the like fully so often as they ? 
And Eve, remarks the old philosopher 
of Radwinter — " Eve will be Eve, 
though Adam would say nay." 

The apparel of the clergy, at any rate, 
was more comely and decent than it 
ever was in the popish church, when 

25 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

the priests " went either in divers colors 
like players, or in garments of light hue, 
as yellow, red, green, etc. ; with their 
shoes piked, their hair crisped, their 
girdles armed with silver ; their shoes, 
spurs, bridles, etc., buckled with like 
metal ; their apparel (for the most part) 
of silk, and richly furred; their caps 
laced and buttoned with gold; so that 
to meet a priest, in those days, was to 
behold a peacock that spreadeth his tail 
when he danceth before the hen." 

Hospitality among the clergy was 
never better used, and it was increased 
by their marriage; for the meat and 
drink were prepared more orderly and 
frugally, the household was better looked 
to, and the poor oftener fed. There 
was perhaps less feasting of the rich 
in bishops' houses, and " it is thought 
much peradventure, that some bishops 
in our time do come short of the ancient 
26 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

gluttony and prodigality of their prede- 
cessors"; but this is owing to the cur- 
tailing of their livings, and the excessive 
prices whereunto things are grown. 

Harrison spoke his mind about digni- 
taries. He makes a passing reference 
to Thomas a Becket as " the old Cocke 
of Canturburie," who did crow in be- 
half of the see of Rome, and the " young 
cockerels of other sees did imitate his 
demeanour." He is glad that images, 
shrines, and tabernacles are removed 
out of churches. The stories in glass 
windows remain only because of the cost 
of replacing them with white panes. He 
would lft£ to stop the wakes, guilds, 
paternities, church-ales, and brides-ales, 
with all their rioting, and he thinks 
they could get on very well without the 
feasts of apostles, evangelists, martyrs, 
the holy-days after Christmas, Easter, 
and Whitsuntide, and those of the Vir- 

27 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

gin Mary, with the rest. " It is a world 
to see," he wrote of 1552, "how ready 
the Catholicks are to cast the commun- 
ion tables out of their churches, which 
in derision they call Oysterboards, and 
to set up altars whereon to say mass." 
And he tells with sinful gravity this tale 
of a sacrilegious sow : " Upon the 23d 
of August, the high altar of Christ 
Church in Oxford was trimly decked up 
after the popish manner; and about the 
middest of evensong, a sow cometh into 
the quire, and pulled all to the ground ; 
for which heinous fact, it is said she 
was afterwards beheaded ; but to that I 
am not privy." Think of the condition 
of Oxford when pigs went to mass ! 
Four years after this there was a sick- 
ness in England, of which a third part 
of the people did taste, and many clergy- 
men, who had prayed not to live after 
the death of Queen Mary, had their de- 
28 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

sire, the Lord hearing their prayer, says 
Harrison, " and intending thereby to 
give his church a breathing time." 

There were four classes in England 
— gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and ar- 
tificers or laborers. Besides the nobles, 
any one can call himself a gentleman 
who can live without work and buy a 
coat of arms — though some of them 
" bear a bigger sail than his boat is 
able to sustain." The complaint of 
sending abroad youth to be educated is 
an old one ; Harrison says the sons of 
gentlemen went into Italy, and brought 
nothing home but mere atheism, infidel- 
ity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, 
proud behavior, and retained neither 
religion nor patriotism. Among citizens 
were the merchants, of whom Harrison 
thought there were too many ; for, like 
the lawyers, they were no furtherance to 
the commonwealth, but, raised the price 

29 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

of all commodities. In former, free- 
trade times, sugar was sixpence a pound, 
now it is two shillings sixpence ; rai- 
sins were one penny, and now sixpence. 
Not content with the old European 
trade, they have sought out the East 
and West Indies, and likewise Cathay 
and Tartary, whence they pretend, from 
their now and then suspicious voyages, 
they bring home great commodities. 
But Harrison cannot see that prices are 
one whit abated by this enormity, and 
certainly they carry out of England the 
best of its wares. 

The yeomen are the stable, free men, 
who for the most part stay in one place, 
working the farms of gentlemen, are 
diligent, sometimes buy the land of un- 
thrifty gentlemen, educate their sons to 
the schools and the law courts, and leave 
them money to live without labor. These 
are the men that made France afraid. 

30 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

Below these are the laborers and men 
who work at trades, who have no voice 
in the commonwealth, and crowds of 
young serving-men who become old beg- 
gars, highway-robbers, idle fellows, and 
spreaders of all vices. There was a 
complaint then, as now, that in many 
trades men scamped their work, but, on 
the whole, husbandmen and artificers 
had never been so good ; only there were 
too many of them, too many handicrafts 
of which the country had no need. It 
appears to be a fault all along in history 
that there are too many of almost every 
sort of people. 

In Harrison's time the greater part of 
the building in cities and towns was of 
timber, only a few of the houses of the 
commonalty being of stone. In an old 
plate giving a view of the north side 
of Cheapside, London, in 1638, we see 
little but quaint gable ends and rows of 

31 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

small windows set close together. The 
houses are of wood and plaster, each 
story overhanging the other, terminat- 
ing in sharp pediments ; the roofs pro- 
jecting on cantilevers, and the windows 
occupying the whole front of each of the 
lower stories. They presented a lively 
and gay appearance on holidays, when 
the pentices of the shop fronts were 
hung with colored draperies, and the 
balconies were crowded with spectators, 
and every pane of glass showed a face. 
In the open country, where timber was 
scarce, the houses were, between studs, 
impanelled with clay — red, white, or blue. 
One of the Spaniards who came over in 
the suite of Philip remarked the large 
diet in these homely cottages : " These 
English," quoth he, " have their houses 
made of sticks and dirt, but they 
fare commonly so well as the king." 
" Whereby it appeareth," comments 

32 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

Harrison, " that he liked better of our 
good fare in such coarse cabins, than of 
their own thin diet in their prince-like 
habitations and palaces." The timber 
houses were covered with tiles ; the other 
sort with straw or reeds. The fairest 
houses were ceiled within with mortar 
and covered with plaster, the whiteness 
and evenness of which excited Harrison's 
admiration. The walls were hung with 
tapestry, arras-work, or painted cloth, 
whereon were divers histories, or herbs, 
or birds, or else ceiled with oak. Stoves 
had just begun to be used, and only in 
some houses of the gentry, " who build 
them not to work and feed in, as in 
Germany and elsewhere, but now and 
then to sweat in, as occasion and need 
shall require." Glass in windows, which 
was then good and cheap, and made 
even in England, had generally taken the 
place of the lattices and of the horn, and 
c 33 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

of the beryl which noblemen formerly 
used in windows. Gentlemen were be- 
ginning to build their houses of brick and 
stone, in stately and magnificent fashion. 
The furniture of the houses had also 
grown in a manner " passing delicacy," 
and not of the nobility and gentry only, 
but of the lowest sort. In noblemen's 
houses there was abundance of arras, 
rich hangings of tapestry, and silver ves- 
sels, plate often to the value of one 
thousand and two thousand pounds. 
The knights, gentlemen, and merchants 
had great provision of tapestry, Turkie 
work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and cup- 
boards of plate worth perhaps a thou- 
sand pounds. Even the inferior ar- 
tificers and many farmers had learned 
also to garnish their cupboards with 
plate, their joined beds with silk hang- 
ings, and their tables with fine linen — 
evidences of wealth for which Harrison 

34 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

thanks God and reproaches no man, 
though he cannot see how it is brought 
about, when all things are grown to such 
excessive prices. 

Old men of Radwinter noted three 
things marvellously altered in England 
within their remembrance. The first 
was the multitude of chimneys lately 
erected ; whereas in their young days 
there were not, always except those in 
the religious and manor houses, above 
two or three chimneys in most upland 
towns of the realm ; each one made his 
'fire against a reredos in the hall, where 
he dined and dressed his meat. The 
second was the amendment in lodging. 
In their youth they lay upon hard straw 
pallets covered only with a sheet, and 
mayhap a dogswain coverlet over them, 
and a good round log for pillow. If in 
seven years after marriage a man could 
buy a mattress and a sack of chaff to 

35 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

rest his head on, he thought himself as 
well lodged as a lord. Pillows were 
thought meet only for sick women. As 
for servants, they were lucky if they 
had a sheet over them, for there was 
nothing under them to keep the straw 
from pricking their hardened hides. 
The third notable thing was the ex- 
change of treene (wooden) platters into 
pewter, and wooden spoons into silver 
or tin. Wooden stuff was plenty, but a 
good farmer would not have above four 
pieces of pewter in his house ; with all 
his frugality, he was unable to pay his 
rent of four pounds without selling a 
cow or horse. It was a time of idleness, 
and if a farmer at an ale-house, in a 
bravery to show what he had, slapped 
down his purse with six shillings in it, 
all the rest together could not match it. 
But now, says Harrison, though the rent 
of four pounds has improved to forty, 

36 



00 




SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

the farmer has six or seven years' rent 
lying by him, to purchase a new term, 
garnish his cupboard with pewter, buy 
three or four feather-beds, coverlets, 
carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a nest 
of bowls for wine, and a dozen spoons. 
All these things speak of the growing 
wealth and luxury of the age. Only a 
little before this date, in 1568, Lord 
Buckhurst, who had been ordered to 
entertain the Cardinal de Chatillon in 
Queen Elizabeth's palace at Sheen, 
complains of the meanness of the furni- 
ture of his rooms. He showed the offi- 
cers who preceded the cardinal such 
furniture and stuff as he had, but it did 
not please them. They wanted plate, he 
had none ; such glass vessels as he had 
they thought too base. They wanted 
damask for long tables, and he had only 
linen for a square table, and they re- 
fused his square table. He gave the 

37 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

cardinal his only unoccupied tester and 
bedstead, and assigned to the bishop the 
bedstead upon which his wife's waiting- 
women did lie, and laid them on the 
ground. He lent the cardinal his own 
basin and . ewer, candlesticks from his 
own table, drinking-glasses, small cush- 
ions, and pots for the kitchen. My 
Lord of Leicester sent down two pair 
of fine sheets for the cardinal and one 
pair for the bishop. 

Harrison laments three things in his 
day : the enhancing of rents, the daily 
oppression of poor tenants by the lords 
of manors, and the practice of usury — 
a trade brought in by the Jews, but now 
practised by almost every Christian, so 
that he is accounted a fool that doth 
lend his money for nothing. He prays 
the reader to help him, in a lawful man- 
ner, to hang up all those that take cent, 
per cent, for money. Another griev- 

38 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

ance, and most sorrowful of all, is that 
many gentlemen, men of good port and 
countenance, to the injury of the farm- 
ers and commonalty, actually turn gra- 
ziers, butchers, tanners, sheep-masters, 
and woodmen. Harrison also notes the 
absorption of lands by the rich ; the de- 
cay of houses in the country, which 
comes of the eating up of the poor by 
the rich ; the increase of poverty ; the 
difficulty a poor man had to live on an 
acre of ground ; his forced contentment 
with bread made of oats and barley, and 
the divers places that formerly had good 
tenants and now were vacant, hop-yards 
and gardens. 

Harrison says it is not for him to de- 
scribe the palaces of Queen Elizabeth ; 
he dare hardly peep in at her gates. 
Her houses are of brick and stone, neat 
and well situated, but in good masonry 
not to be compared to those of Henry 

39 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

VIII. 's building ; they are rather curi- 
ous to the eye, like paper-works, than 
substantial for continuance. Her court 
is more magnificent than any other in 
Europe, whether you regard the rich 
and infinite furniture of the household, 
the number of officers, or the sumptuous 
entertainments. And the honest chroni- 
cler is so struck with admiration of the 
virtuous beauty of the maids of honor 
that he cannot tell whether to award 
pre-eminence to their amiable counte- 
nances or to their costliness of attire, 
between which there is daily conflict and 
contention. The courtiers of both sexes 
have the use of sundry languages and 
an excellent vein of writing. Would to 
God the rest of their lives and conver- 
sation corresponded with these gifts ! 
But the courtiers, the most learned, 
are the worst men when they come 
abroad that any man shall hear or read 

40 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

of. Many of the gentlewomen have 
sound knowledge of Greek and Latin, 
and are skilful in Spanish, Italian and 
French ; and the noblemen even surpass 
them. The old ladies of the court avoid 
idleness by needle-work, spinning of silk, 
or continual reading of the Holy Script- 
ures or of histories, and writing diverse 
volumes of their own, or translating for- 
eign works into English or Latin ; and 
the young ladies, when they are not 
waiting on her majesty, " in the mean 
time apply their lutes, citherns, prick- 
song, and all kinds of music." The 
elders are skilful in surgery and the dis- 
tillation of waters, and sundry other 
artificial practices pertaining to the orna- 
ture and commendation of their bodies ; 
and when they are at home they go into 
the kitchen and supply a number of deli- 
cate dishes of their own devising, mostly 
after Portuguese receipts ; and they pre- 

41 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

pare bills of fare (a trick lately taken up) 
to give a brief rehearsal of all the dishes 
of every course. I do not know whether 
this was called the " higher education of 
women " at the time. 

In every office of the palaces is a 
Bible, or book of acts of the church, or 
chronicle, for the use of whoever comes 
in, so that the court looks more like a 
university than a palace. Would to 
God the houses of the nobles were ruled 
like the queen's ! The nobility are fol- 
lowed by great troops of serving-men in 
showy liveries ; and it is a goodly sight 
to see them muster at court, which, be- 
ing filled with them, " is made like to 
the show of a peacock's tail in the full 
beauty, or of some meadow garnished 
with infinite kinds and diversity of 
pleasant flowers." Such was the disci- 
pline of Elizabeth's court that any man 
who struck another within it had his 

42 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

right hand chopped off by the execu- 
tioner in a most horrible manner. 

The English have always had a pas- 
sion for gardens and orchards. In the 
Roman time grapes abounded and wine 
was plenty, but the culture disappeared 
after the Conquest. From the time of 
Henry IV. to Henry VIII. vegetables 
were little used, but in Harrison's day 
the use of melons, pompions, radishes, 
cucumbers, cabbages, turnips, and the 
like was revived. They had beautiful 
flower-gardens annexed to the houses, 
wherein were grown also rare and me- 
dicinal herbs ; it was a wonder to see 
how many strange herbs, plants, and 
fruitswere daily brought from the Indies, 
America, and the Canaries. Every rich 
man had great store of flowers, and in 
one garden might be seen from three 
hundred to four hundred medicinal herbs. 
Men extol the foreign herbs to the neg- 

43 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

lect of the native, and especially tobac- 
co, "which is not found of so great effi- 
cacy as they write." In the orchards 
were plums, apples, pears, walnuts, fil- 
berts; and in noblemen's orchards store 
of strange fruit — apricots, almonds, 
peaches, figs, and even in some oranges, 
lemons, and capers. Grafters also were 
at work with their artificial mixtures, 
" dallying, as it were, with nature and her 
course, as if her whole trade were perfect- 
ly known unto them : of hard fruits they 
will make soft, of sour sweet, of sweet 
yet more delicate ; bereaving also some 
of their kernels, others of their cores, 
and finally endowing them with the flavor 
of musk, amber, or sweet spices at their 
pleasure." Gardeners turn annual into 
perpetual herbs, and such pains are 
they at that they even used dish-water 
for plants. The Gardens of Hesperides 
are surely not equal to these. Pliny 

44 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

tells of a rose that had sixty leaves on 
one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in 
Antwerp that had one hundred and 
eighty leaves ; and Harrison might have 
had a slip of it for ten pounds, but 
he thought it a " tickle hazard." In 
his own little garden, of not above 
three hundred square feet, he had near 
three hundred samples, and not one of 
them of the common, or usually to be 
had. 

Our kin beyond sea have always been 
stout eaters of solid food, and in Eliz- 
abeth's time their tables were more 
plentifully laden than those of any other 
nation. Harrison scientifically accounts 
for their inordinate appetite. " The 
situation of our region," he says, "ly- 
ing near unto the north, does cause the 
heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat 
greater force ; therefore our bodies do 
crave a little more ample nourishment 

45 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

than the inhabitants of the hotter re- 
gions are accustomed withal, whose di- 
gestive force is not altogether so vehe- 
ment, because their internal heat is not 
so strong as ours, which is kept in by 
the coldness of the air, that from time 
to time (specially in winter) doth envi- 
ron our bodies." The north Britons in 
old times were accustomed often to great 
abstinence, and lived when in the woods 
on roots and herbs. They used some- 
times a confection, " whereof so much as 
a bean would qualify their hunger above 
common expectation"; but when they 
had nothing to qualify it with, they 
crept into the marsh water up to their 
chins, and there remained a long time, 
" only to qualify the heat of their stom- 
achs by violence." 

In Harrison's day the abstemious 
Welsh had learned to eat like the Eng- 
lish, and the Scotch exceeded the lat- 

4 6 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

ter in " over much and distemperate 
gormandize." The English eat all they 
can buy, there being no restraint of any 
meat for religion's sake or for public 
order. The white meats — milk, but- 
ter, and cheese — though very dear, are 
reputed as good for inferior people, but 
the more wealthy feed upon the flesh of 
all sorts of cattle and all kinds of fish. 
The nobility (" whose cooks are for the 
most part musical-headed Frenchmen 
and strangers ") exceed in number of 
dishes and change of meat. Every day 
at dinner there is beef, mutton, veal, 
lamb, kid, pork, conie, capon, pig, or 
as many of these as the season yielded, 
besides deer and wild-fowl and fish, and 
sundry delicacies " wherein the sweet 
hand of the seafaring Portingale is not 
wanting." The food was brought in 
commonly in silver vessels at tables of 
the degree of barons, bishops, and up- 

47 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

wards, and referred first to the principal 
personage, from whom it passed to the 
lower end of the table, the guests not 
eating of all, but choosing what each 
liked; and nobody stuffed himself. The 
dishes were then sent to the servants, 
and the remains of the feast went to the 
poor, who lay waiting at the gates in 
great numbers. 

Drink was served in pots, goblets, 
jugs, and bowls of silver in noblemen's 
houses, and also in Venice glasses. It 
was not set upon the table, but the cup 
was brought to each one who thirsted ; 
he called for such a cup of drink as he 
wished, and delivered it again to one of 
the bystanders, who made it clean by 
pouring out what remained, and restored 
it to the sideboard. This device was 
to prevent great drinking, which might 
ensue if the full pot stood always at the 
elbow. But this order was not used in 

48 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

noblemen's halls, nor in any order under 
the degree of knight or squire of great 
revenue. It was a world to see how the 
nobles preferred to gold and silver, which 
abounded, the new Venice glass, whence 
a great trade sprang up with Murano 
that made many rich. The poorest 
even would have glass, but home-made 
— a foolish expense, for the glass soon 
went to bits, and the pieces turned to 
no profit. Harrison wanted the philos- 
opher's stone to mix with this molten 
glass and toughen it. 

There were multitudes of dependants 
fed at the great houses, and everywhere, 
according to means, a wide-open hospi- 
tality was maintained. Froude gives a 
notion of the style of living in earlier 
times by citing the details of a feast 
given when George Neville, brother of 
Warwick the king - maker, was made 
archbishop of York. There were pres- 

d 49 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

ent, including servants, thirty-five hun- 
dred persons. These are a few of the 
things used at the banquet : three hun- 
dred quarters of wheat, three hundred 
tuns of ale, one hundred and four tuns 
of wine, eighty oxen, three thousand 
geese, two thousand pigs, four thousand 
conies, four thousand heronshaws, four 
thousand venison pasties cold and five 
hundred hot, four thousand cold tarts, 
four thousand cold custards, eight seals, 
four porpoises, and so on. 

The merchants and gentlemen kept 
much the same tables as the nobles, es- 
pecially at feasts, but when alone were 
content with a few dishes. They also 
desired the dearest food, and would have 
no meat from the butcher's but the most 
delicate, while their list of fruits, cakes, 
cates, and outlandish confections is as 
long as that at any modern banquet. 
Wine ran in excess. There were used 

50 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

fifty-six kinds of light wines, like the 
French, and thirty of the strong sorts, 
like the Italian and Eastern. The strong- 
er the wine, the better it was liked. The 
strongest and best was in old times called 
theologicum, because it was had from the 
clergy and religious men, to whose houses 
the laity sent their bottles to be filled, 
sure that the religious would neither 
drink nor be served with the worst ; for 
the merchant would have thought his 
soul should have gone straightway to the 
devil if he had sent them any but the 
best. The beer served at noblemen's 
tables was commonly a year old, and 
sometimes two, but this age was not 
usual. In households generally it was 
not under a month old, for beer was 
liked stale if it were not sour, while 
bread was desired as new as possible so 
that it was not hot. 

The husbandman and artificer ate such 
51 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

meat as they could easiest come by and 
have most quickly ready ; yet the ban- 
quets of the trades in London were not 
inferior to those of the nobility. The 
husbandmen, however, exceed in pro- 
fusion, and it is incredible to tell what 
meat is consumed at bridals, purifica- 
tions, and such like odd meetings ; but 
each guest brought his own provision, 
so that the master of the house had only 
to provide bread, drink, house-room, and 
fire. These lower classes Harrison found 
very friendly at their tables — merry 
without malice, plain without Italian or 
French subtlety — so that it would do a 
man good to be in company among them; 
but if they happen to stumble upon a 
piece of venison or a cup of wine or very 
strong beer, they do not stick to com- 
pare themselves with the lord-mayor — 
and there is no public man in any city 
of Europe that may compare with him 

52 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

in port and countenance during the term 
of his office. 

Harrison commends the great silence 
used at the tables of the wiser sort, and 
generally throughout the realm,and like- 
wise the moderate eating and drinking. 
But the poorer countrymen do babble 
somewhat at table, and mistake ribaldry 
and loquacity for wit and wisdom, and 
occasionally are cup-shotten ; and what 
wonder, when they who have hard diet 
and small drink at home come to such 
opportunities at a banquet ! The wealth- 
ier sort in the country entertain their 
visitors from afar, however long they 
stay, with as hearty a welcome the last 
day as the first; and the countrymen 
contrast this hospitality with that of 
their London cousins, who joyfully re- 
ceive them the first day, tolerate them 
the second, weary of them the third, and 
wish 'em at the devil after four days. 

53 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

The gentry usually ate wheat bread, 
of which there were four kinds ; and the 
poor generally bread made of rye, bar- 
ley, and even oats and acorns. Corn 
was getting so dear, owing to the fore- 
stalled and middle-men, that, says the 
historian, " if the world last a while after 
this rate, wheat and rye will be no grain 
for poor men to feed on ; and some 
catterpillers [two - legged speculators] 
there are that can say so much al- 
ready." 

The great drink of the realm was, of 
course, beer (and it is to be noted that 
a great access of drunkenness came into 
England with the importation much later 
of Holland gin) made from barley, hops, 
and water, and upon the brewing of it 
Harrison dwells lovingly, and devotes 
many pages to a description of the proc- 
ess, especially as "once in a month prac- 
tised by my wife and her maid servants." 

54 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

They ground eight bushels of malt, add- 
ed half a bushel of wheat meal, half a 
bushel of oat meal, poured in eighty gal- 
lons of water, then eighty gallons more, 
and a third eighty gallons, and boiled 
with a couple of pounds of hops. This, 
with a few spices thrown in, made three 
hogsheads of good beer, meet for a poor 
man who had only forty pounds a year. 
This two hundred gallons of beer cost al- 
together twenty shillings ; but although 
he says his wife brewed it " once in a 
month," whether it lasted a whole month 
the parson does not say. He was particu- 
lar about the water used : the Thames is 
best, the marsh worst, and clear spring 
water next worst ; " the fattest standing 
water is always the best." Cider and 
perry were made in some parts of Eng- 
land, and a delicate sort of drink in 
Wales, called metheglin ; but there was 
a kind of " swish-swash " made in Es- 

55 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

sex from honey-combs and water, called 
mead, which differed from the metheglin 
as chalk from cheese. 

In Shakespeare's day much less time 
was spent in eating and drinking than 
formerly, when, besides breakfast in the 
forenoon and dinners, there were " bev- 
erages" or " nuntion " after dinner, and 
supper before going to bed — "a toie 
brought in by hardie Canutus," who 
was a gross feeder. Generally there 
were, except for the young who could 
not fast till dinner-time, only two meals 
daily, dinner and supper. Yet the Nor- 
mans had brought in the habit of sitting 
long at the table — a custom not yet al- 
together abated, since the great people, 
especially at banquets, sit till two or 
three o'clock in the afternoon ; so that it 
is a hard matter to rise and go to even- 
ing prayers and return in time for sup- 
per. 

56 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

Harrison does not make much account 
of the early meal called " breakfast "; 
but Froude says that in Elizabeth's time 
the common hour of rising, in the coun- 
try, was four o'clock, summer and win- 
ter, and that breakfast was at five, after 
which the laborers went to work and 
the gentlemen to business. The Earl 
and Countess of Northumberland break- . 
fasted together and alone at seven. The 
meal consisted of a quart of ale, a quart 
of wine, and a chine of beef; a loaf of 
bread is not mentioned, but we hope 
(says Froude) it may be presumed. The 
gentry dined at eleven and supped at 
five. The merchants took dinner at 
noon, and, in London, supped at six. 
The university scholars out of term ate 
dinner at ten. The husbandmen dined at 
high noon, and took supper at seven or 
eight. As for the poorer sort, it is need- 
less to talk of their order of repast, for 

57 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

they dined and supped when they could. 
The English usually began meals with 
the grossest food and ended with the 
most delicate, taking first the mild wines 
and ending with the hottest ; but the 
prudent Scot did otherwise, making 
his entrance with the best, so that 
he might leave the worse to the me- 
nials. 

.1 will close this portion of our sketch 
of English manners with an extract from 
the travels of Hentzner, who visited 
England in 1598, and saw the great 
queen go in state to chapel at Green- 
wich, and afterwards witnessed the lay- 
ing of the table for her dinner. It was 
on Sunday. The queen was then in her 
sixth-fifth year, and " very majestic," 
as she walked in the splendid procession 
of barons, earls, and knights of the gar- 
ter: " her face, oblong, fair, but wrin- 
kled ; her eyes small, yet black and pleas- 

58 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

ant ; her nose a little hooked ; her lips 
narrow, and her teeth black (a defect 
the English seem subject to from their 
great use of sugar). She had in her 
ears two pearls with very rich drops ; 
she wore false hair, and that red ; upon 
her head she had a small crown, reported 
to be made of some of the gold of'the 
celebrated Lunebourg table. Her bosom 
was uncovered, as all the English ladies 
have it till they marry ; and she had on 
a necklace of exceeding fine jewels; her 
hands were small, her fingers long, and 
her stature neither small nor low; her 
air was stately, her manner of speaking 
mild and obliging. That day she was 
dressed in white silk, bordered with 
pearls of the size of beans, and over it 
a mantle of black silk, shot with silver 
threads ; her train was very long, and 
the end of it borne by a marchioness; 
instead of a chain she had an oblong col- 

59 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

lar of gold and jewels." As she swept 
on in this magnificence, she spoke gra- 
ciously first to one, then to another, and 
always in the language of any foreigner 
she addressed ; whoever spoke to her 
kneeled, and wherever she turned her 
face, as she was going along, everybody 
fell down on his knees. When she pulled 
off her glove to give her hand to be 
kissed, it was seen to be sparkling with 
rings and jewels. The ladies of the court, 
handsome and well shaped, followed, 
dressed for the most part in white ; 
and on either side she was guarded 
by fifty gentlemen pensioners with gilt 
battle-axes. In the ante-chapel, where 
she graciously received petitions, there 
was an acclaim of " Long live Queen 
Elizabeth !" to which she answered, " I 
thank you, my good people." The music 
in the chapel was excellent, and the 
whole service was over in half an hour. 

60' 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

This is Hentzner's description of the 
setting out of her table : 

" A gentleman entered the room bear- 
ing a rod, and along with him another 
who had a table-cloth, which, after they 
had both kneeled three times, he spread 
upon the table ; and after kneeling again 
they both retired. Then came two 
others, one with the rod again, the other 
with a salt-cellar, a plate, and bread ; and 
when they had kneeled as the others had 
done, and placed what was brought upon 
the table, they two retired with the same 
ceremonies performed by the first. At 
last came an unmarried lady (we were 
told she was a countess) and along with 
her a married one, bearing a tasting- 
knife ; the former was dressed in white 
silk, who, when she had prostrated her- 
self three times, in the most graceful 
manner approached the table, and rubbed 
the plates with bread and salt, with as 

61 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

much awe as if the Queen had been pres- 
ent. When they had waited there a lit- 
tle while the Yeomen of the Guard en- 
tered, bare-headed^ clothed in scarlet, 
with a golden rose upon their backs, 
bringing in at each turn a course of twen- 
ty-four dishes, served in plate, most of 
it gilt ; these dishes were received by a 
gentleman in the same order they were 
brought, and placed upon the table, while 
the Lady Taster gave to each of the 
guard a mouthful to eat, of the particu- 
lar dish he had brought, for fear of any 
poison. During the time that this guard, 
which consists of the tallest and stout- 
est men that can be found in all Eng- 
land, being carefully selected for this 
service, were bringing dinner, twelve 
trumpets and two kettle-drums made 
the hall ring for half an hour together. 
At the end of all this ceremonial, a num- 
ber of unmarried ladies appeared, who 

62 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

with particular solemnity lifted the meat 
of! the table and conveyed it into the 
Queen's inner and more private cham- 
ber, where, after she had chosen for her- 
self, the rest goes to the Ladies of the 
court." 

The queen dined and supped alone, 
with very few attendants. 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 



CHAPTER II 

We now approach perhaps the most 
important matter in this world, namely, 
dress. In nothing were the increasing 
wealth and extravagance of the period 
more shown than in apparel. And in it 
we are able to study the origin of the 
present English taste for the juxtapo- 
sition of striking and uncomplementary 
colors. In Coryat's "Crudities," 1611, 
we have an Englishman's contrast of the 
dress of the Venetians and the English. 
The Venetians adhered, without change, 
to their decent fashion, a thousand years 
old, wearing usually black: the slender 
doublet made close to the body, without 
much quilting ; the long hose plain, the 

jerkin also black — but all of the most 

64 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

costly stuffs Christendom can furnish, 
satins and taffetas, garnished with the 
best lace. Gravity and good taste char- 
acterized their apparel. " In both these 
things," says Coryat, " they differ much 
from us Englishmen. For whereas they 
have but one color, we use many more 
than are in the rainbow, all the most 
light, garish, and unseemly colors that 
are in the world. Also for fashion we 
are much inferior to them. For w.e 
wear more fantastical fashions than any 
nation under the sun doth, the French 
only excepted." On festival days, in 
processions, the senators wore crimson 
damask gowns, with flaps of crimson 
velvet cast over their left shoulders ; and 
the Venetian knights differed from the 
other gentlemen, for under their black 
damask gowns, with long sleeves, they 
wore red apparel, red silk stockings, and 
red pantofles. 

E 65 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Andrew Boord, in 1547, attempting to 
describe the fashions of his countrymen, 
gave up the effort in sheer despair over 
the variety and fickleness of costume, 
and drew a naked man with a pair of 
shears in one hand and a piece of cloth 
in the other, to the end that he should 
shape his apparel as he himself liked ; 
and this he called an Englishman. Even 
the gentle Harrison, who gives Boord 
the too harsh character of a lewd popish 
hypocrite and ungracious priest, admits 
that he was not void of judgment in this ; 
and he finds it easier to inveigh against 
the enormity, the fickleness, and the fan- 
tasticality of the English attire than to 
describe it. So unstable is the fashion, 
he says, that to-day the Spanish guise 
is in favor; to-morrow the French toys 
are most fine and delectable ; then the 
high German apparel is the go ; next the 
Turkish manner is best liked, the Mo- 

66 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

risco gowns, the Barbary sleeves, and 
the short French breeches ; in a word, 
" except it were a dog in a doublet, you 
shall not see any so disguised as are my 
countrymen in England." 

This fantastical folly was in all de- 
grees, from the courtier down to the 
carter. " It is a world to see the cost- 
liness and the curiosity, the excess and 
the vanity, the pomp and the bravery, 
the change and the variety, and finally 
the fickleness and the folly that is in all 
degrees ; insomuch that nothing is more 
constant in England than inconstancy of 
attire. So much cost upon the body, so 
little upon souls ; how many suits of ap- 
parel hath the one, or how little furni- 
ture hath the other !" And how men 
and women worry the poor tailors, with 
endless fittings and sending back of gar- 
ments, and trying on ! " Then must the 
long seams of our hose be set with a 

67 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

plumb line, then we puff, then we blow, 
and finally sweat till we drop, that our 
clothes may stand well upon us." 

The barbers were as cunning in vari- 
ety as the tailors. Sometimes the head 
was polled; sometimes the hair was 
curled, and then suffered to grow long 
like a woman's locks, and many times 
cut off, above or under the ears, round 
as by a wooden dish. And so with the 
beards : some shaved from the chin, like 
the Turks ; some cut short, like the beard 
of the Marquis Otto ; some made round, 
like a rubbing - brush ; some peaked, 
others grown long. If a man have a 
lean face, the Marquis Otto's cut makes 
it broad ; if it be platter-like, the long, 
slender beard makes it seem narrow ; 
"if he be weasel-beaked, then much 
hair left on the cheeks will make the 
owner look big like a bowdled hen, and 
so grim as a goose." Some courageous 

68 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

gentlemen wore in their ears rings of 
gold and stones, to improve God's work, 
which was otherwise set off by mon- 
strous quilted and stuffed doublets, that 
puffed out the figure like a barrel. 

There is some consolation, though I 
don't know why, in the knowledge that 
writers have always found fault with 
women's fashions, as they do to-day. 
Harrison says that the women do far 
exceed the lightness of the men ; " such 
staring attire as in time past was sup- 
posed meet for light housewives only is 
now become an habit for chaste and so- 
ber matrons." And he knows not what 
to say of their doublets, with pendant 
pieces on the breast full of jags and cuts ; 
their " galligascons," to make their 
dresses stand out plumb round ; their 
farthingales and divers colored stock- 
ings. " I have met," he says, " with 
some of these trulls in London so dis- 

69 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

guised that it hath passed my skill to 
determine whether they were men or 
women." Of all classes the merchants 
were most to be commended for rich but 
sober attire ; " but the younger sort of 
their wives, both in attire and costly 
housekeeping, cannot tell when and how 
to make an end, as being women in- 
deed in whom all kind of curiosity is to 
be found and seen." Elizabeth's time, 
like our own, was distinguished by new 
fashionable colors, among which are 
mentioned a queer greenish-yellow, a 
pease-porridge-tawny, a popinjay of blue, 
a lusty gallant, and the " devil in the 
hedge." These may be favorites still, 
for aught I know. 

Mr. Furnivall quotes a description of 
a costume of the period, from the man- 
uscript of Orazio Busino's " Anglipo- 
trida." Busino was the chaplain of Piero 
Contarina, the Venetian ambassador to 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

James I., in 1617. The chaplain was 
one day stunned with grief over the 
death of the butler of the embassy ; and 
as the Italians sleep away grief, the 
French sing, the Germans drink, and 
the English go to plays to be rid of it, 
the Venetians, by advice, sought conso- 
lation at the Fortune Theatre ; and there 
a trick was played upon old Busino, by 
placing him among a bevy of young 
women, while the concealed ambassa- 
dor and the secretary enjoyed the joke. 
" These theatres," says Busino, " are 
frequented by a number of respectable 
and handsome ladies, who come freely 
and seat themselves among the men 
without the slightest hesitation. . . . 
Scarcely was I seated ere a very elegant 
dame, but in a mask, came and placed 
herself beside me. . . . She asked me 
for my address both in French and Eng- 
lish ; and, on my turning a deaf ear, 

71 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

she determined to honor me by show- 
ing me some fine diamonds on her fin- 
gers, repeatedly taking off no fewer than 
three gloves, which were worn one over 
the other. . . . This lady's bodice was 
of yellow satin, richly embroidered, her 
petticoat* of gold tissue with stripes, 
her robe of red velvet with a raised pile, 
lined with yellow muslin with broad 
stripes of pure gold. She wore an 
apron of point lace of various patterns ; 
her head-tire was highly perfumed, and 
the collar of white satin beneath the 
delicately wrought ruff struck me as ex- 
ceedingly pretty." It was quite in keep- 
ing with the manners of the day for a 

* It is a trifle in human progress, perhaps 
scarcely worth noting, that the " round 
gown," that is, an entire skirt, not open in 
front and parting to show the under petti- 
coat, did not come into fashion till near the 
close of the eighteenth century. 

72 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

lady of rank to have lent herself to this 
hoax of the chaplain. 

Van Meteren, a Netherlander, 1575, 
speaks also of the astonishing change or 
changeableness in English fashions, but 
says the women are well dressed and 
modest, and they go about the streets 
without any covering of mantle, hood, 
or veil ; only the married women wear 
a hat in the street and in the house ; 
the unmarried go without a hat ; but 
ladies of distinction have lately learned 
to cover their faces with silken masks 
or vizards, and to wear feathers. The 
English, he notes, change their fashions 
every year, and when they go abroad 
riding or travelling they don their best 
clothes, contrary to the practice of other 
nations. Another foreigner, Jacob Rath- 
geb, 1592, says the English go dressed 
in exceeding fine clothes, and some will 
even wear velvet in the street, when 

73 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

they have not at home perhaps a piece 
of dry bread. " The lords and pages of 
the royal court have a stately, noble air, 
but dress more after the French fashion, 
only they wear short cloaks and some- 
times Spanish caps." 

Harrison's arraignment of the English 
fashions of his day may be considered 
as almost commendative beside the dia- 
tribes of the old Puritan Philip Stubbes, 
in " The Anatomie of Abuses," 1583. The 
English language is strained for words 
hot and rude enough to express his in- 
dignation, contempt, and fearful expec- 
tation of speedy judgments. The men 
escape his hands with scarcely less dam- 
age than the women. First he wreaks 
his indignation upon the divers kinds of 
hats, stuck full of feathers, of various 
colors, "ensigns of vanity," "fluttering 
sails and feathered flags of defiance to 
virtue" ; then upon the monstrous ruffs 

74 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

that stand out a quarter of a yard from 
the neck. As the devil, in the fulness of 
his malice, first invented these ruffs, so 
has he found out two stays to bear up 
this his great kingdom of ruffs — one is a 
kind of liquid matter they call starch ; 
the other is a device made of wires, for 
an under-propper. Then there are shirts 
of cambric, holland, and lawn, wrought 
with fine needle-work of silk and curi- 
ously stitched, costing sometimes as 
much as five pounds. Worse still are 
the monstrous doublets, reaching down 
to the middle of the thighs, so hard 
quilted, stuffed, bombasted, and sewed 
that the wearer can hardly stoop 
down in them. Below these are the 
gally-hose of silk, velvet, satin, and 
damask, reaching below the knees. So 
costly are these that "now it is a small 
matter to bestow twenty nobles, ten 
pound, twenty pound, fortie pound, yea 

75 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

a hundred pound of one pair of Breeches. 
(God be merciful unto us !)" To these 
gay hose they add nether-socks, curi- 
ously knit with open seams down the 
leg, with quirks and clocks about the 
ankles, and sometimes interlaced with 
gold and silver thread as is wonderful 
to behold. Time has been when a man 
could clothe his whole body for the 
price of these nether-socks. Satan was 
further let loose in the land by reason 
of cork shoes and fine slippers, of all 
colors, carved, cut, and stitched with 
silk, and laced on with gold and silver, 
which went flipping and flapping up and 
down in the dirt. The jerkins and 
cloaks are of all colors and fashions ; 
some short, reaching to the knee ; others 
dragging on the ground ; red, white, 
black, violet, yellow, guarded, laced, and 
faced ; hanged with points and tassels 
of gold, silver, and silk. The hilts of 

76 




VELVET BREECHES AND CLOTH BREECHES 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

daggers, rapiers, and swords are gilt 
thrice over, and have scabbards of vel- 
vet. And all this while the poor lie in 
London streets upon pallets of straw, 
or else in the mire and dirt, and die 
like dogs ! 

Stubbes was a stout old Puritan, bent 
upon hewing his way to heaven through 
all the allurements of this world, and 
suspecting a devil in every fair show. I 
fear that he looked upon woman as only 
a vain and trifling image, a delusive toy, 
away from whom a man must set his 
face. Shakespeare, who was country- 
bred when he came up to London, and 
lived probably on the roystering South 
Side, near the theatres and bear-gardens, 
seems to have been impressed with the 
painted faces of the women. It is prob- 
able that only town-bred women painted. 
Stubbes declares that the women of Eng- 
land color their faces with oils, liquors, 

77 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

unguents, and waters made to that end, 
thinking to make themselves fairer than 
God made them — a presumptuous au- 
dacity to make God untrue in his word ; 
and he heaps vehement curses upon the 
immodest practice. To this follows the 
trimming and tricking of their heads, the 
laying out their hair to show, which is 
curled, crisped, and laid out on wreaths 
and borders from ear to ear. Lest it 
should fall down it is under-propped with 
forks, wires, and what not. On the edges 
of their bolstered hair (for it standeth 
crested round about their frontiers, and 
hanging over their faces like pendices 
with glass windows on every side) is laid 
great wreaths of gold and silver curious- 
ly wrought. But this is not the worst 
nor the tenth part, for no pen is able to 
describe the wickedness. " The women 
use great ruffs and neckerchers of Hol- 
land, lawn, camerick, and such cloth, as 
78 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

the greatest thread shall not be so big as 
the least hair that is : then, lest they 
should fall down, they are smeared and 
starched in the Devil's liquor, I mean 
Starch ; after that dried with great dili- 
gence, streaked, patted and rubbed very 
nicely, and so applied to their goodly 
necks, and, withall, under-propped with 
supportasses, the stately arches of pride ; 
beyond all this they have a further fetch, 
nothing inferior to the rest ; as, namely, 
three or four degrees of minor ruffs, 
placed gradatim, step by step, one be- 
neath another, and all under the Master 
devil ruff. The skirts, then, of these 
great ruffs are long and side every way, 
pleted and crested full curiously, God 
wot." 

Time will not serve us to follow old 
Stubbes into his particular inquisition of 
every article of woman's attire, and his 
hearty damnation of them all and several. 

79 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

He cannot even abide their carrying of 
nosegays and posies of flowers to smell 
at, since the palpable odors and fumesof 
these do enter the brain to degenerate 
the spirit and allure to vice. They must 
needs carry looking-glasses with them; 
" and good reason," says Stubbes, sav- 
agely, " for else how could they see the 
devil in them ? for no doubt they are the 
devil's spectacles [these women] to al- 
lure us to pride and consequently to de- 
struction forever." And, as if it were 
not enough to be women, and the devil's 
aids, they do also have doublets and 
jerkins, buttoned up the breast, and made 
with wings, welts, and pinions on the 
shoulder points, as man's apparel is, for 
all the world. We take reluctant leave 
of this entertaining woman-hater, and 
only stay to quote from him a " fearful 
Judgment of God, shewed upon a gen- 
tlewoman of Antwerp of late, even the 
80 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

27th of May, 1582," which may be as 
profitable to read now as it was then : 
" This gentlewoman being a very rich 
Merchant man's daughter: upon a time 
was invited to a bridal, or wedding, which 
was solemnized in that Toune, against 
which day she made great preparation, 
for the pluming herself in gorgeous ar- 
ray, that as her body was most beauti- 
ful, fair, and proper, so her attire in ev- 
ery respect might be correspondent to 
the same. For the accomplishment 
whereof she curled her hair, she dyed 
her locks, and laid them out after the 
best manner, she colored her face with 
waters and Ointments : But in no case 
could she get any (so curious and dainty 
she was) that could starch, and set her 
Ruffs and Neckerchers to her mind : 
wherefore she sent for a couple of Laun- 
dresses, who did the best they could to 
please her humors, but in any wise they 

F 8l 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

could not. Then fell she to swear and 
tear, to curse and damn, casting the Ruffs 
under feet, and wishing that the Devil 
might take her when she wear any of 
those Neckerchers again. In the mean- 
time (through the sufference of God) 
the Devil transforming himself into the 
form of a young man, as brave and 
proper as she in every point of outward 
appearance, came in, feigning himself 
to be a wooer or suitor unto her. And 
seeing her thus agonized, and in such a 
pelting chase, he demanded of her the 
cause thereof, who straightway told him 
(as women can conceal nothing that lieth 
upon their stomachs) howshe was abused 
in the setting of her Ruffs, which thing 
being heard of him, he promised to 
please her mind, and thereto took in 
hand the setting of her Ruffs, which he 
performed to her great contentation and 
liking, in so much as she looking herself 
82 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

in a glass (as the Devil bade her) became 
greatly enamoured of him. This done, 
the young man kissed her, in the doing 
whereof she writhe her neck in sunder, 
so she died miserably, her body being 
metamorphosed into black and blue col- 
ors, most ugglesome to behold, and her 
face (which before was so amorous) be- 
came most deformed, and fearful to look 
upon. This being known, preparaunce 
was made for her burial, a rich coffin 
was provided, and her fearful body was 
laid therein, and it covered very sumpt- 
uously. Four men immediately assay- 
ed to lift up the corpse, but could not 
move it ; then six attempted the like, but 
could not once stir it from the place 
where it stood. Whereat the standers- 
by marveling, caused the coffin to be 
opened to see the cause thereof. Where 
they found the body to be taken away, 
and a black Cat very lean and deformed 

83 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

sitting in the coffin, setting of great 
Ruffs, and frizzling of hair, to the great 
fear and wonder of all beholders." 

Better than this pride which fore- 
runneth destruction, in the opinion of 
Stubbes, is the habit of the Brazilian 
women, who " esteem so little of appar- 
el" that they rather choose to go naked 
than be thought to be proud. 

As I read the times of Elizabeth, there 
was then greater prosperity and enjoy- 
ment of life among the common people 
than fifty or a hundred years later. Into 
the question of the prices of labor and 
of food, which Mr. Froude considers so 
fully in the first chapter of his history, 
I shall not enter any further than to re- 
mark that the hardness of the laborer's 
lot, who got, mayhap, only twopence a 
day, is mitigated by the fact that for a 
penny he could buy a pound of meat 
which now costs a shilling. In two re- 
84 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

spects England has greatly changed for 
the traveller, from the sixteenth to the 
eighteenth century — in its inns and its 
roads. 

In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign 
travellers had no choice but to ride on 
horseback or to walk. Goods were trans- 
ported on strings of pack-horses. When 
Elizabeth rode into the city from her 
residence at Greenwich, she placed her- 
self behind her lord chancellor, on a 
pillion. The first improvement made 
was in the construction of a rude wagon — 
a cart without springs, the body resting 
solidly on the axles. In such a vehicle 
Elizabeth rode to the opening of her 
fifth Parliament. In 1583, on a certain 
day, Sir Harry Sydney entered Shrews- 
bury in his wagon, " with his trompeter 
blowynge, verey joyfull to behold and 
see." Even such conveyances fared hard 
on the execrable roads of the period. 

85 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Down to the end of the seventeenth 
century most of the country roads were 
merely broad ditches, water-worn and 
strewn with loose stones. In i64oQueen 
Henrietta was four weary days dragging 
over the road from Dover to London, 
the best in England. Not till the close 
of the sixteenth century was the wagon 
used, and then rarely. Fifty years later 
stage-wagons ran, with some regularity, 
between London and Liverpool; and be- 
fore the close of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the stage-coach, a wonderful inven- 
tion, which had been used in and about 
London since 1650, was placed on three 
principal roads of the kingdom. It aver- 
aged two to three miles an hour. In 
the reign of Charles II. a Frenchman 
who landed at Dover was drawn up to 
London in a wagon with six horses in a 
line, one after the other. Our Venetian, 
Busino, who went to Oxford in the coach 

36 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

with the ambassador in 1617, was six 
days in going one hundred and fifty 
miles, as the coach often stuck in the 
mud, and once broke down. So bad 
were the main thoroughfares, even, that 
markets were sometimes inaccessible for 
months together, and the fruits of the 
earth rotted in one place, while there 
was scarcity not many miles distant. 

But this difficulty of travel and liabil- 
ity to be detained long on the road were 
cheered by good inns, such as did not 
exist in the world elsewhere. All the 
literature of the period reflects lovingly 
the home-like delights of these comfort- 
able houses of entertainment. Every 
little village boasted an excellent inn, 
and in the towns on the great thorough- 
fares were sumptuous houses that would 
accomodate from two to three hundred 
guests with their horses. The land- 
lords were not tyrants, as on the Conti- 

87 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

nent, but servants of their guests ; and 
it was, says Harrison, a world to see 
how they did contend for the entertain- 
ment of their guests — as about fineness 
and change of linen, furniture of bed- 
ding, beauty of rooms, service at the 
table, costliness of plate, strength of 
drink, variety of wines, or well-using of 
horses. The gorgeous signs at their 
doors sometimes cost forty pounds. The 
inns were cheap too, and the landlord 
let no one depart dissatisfied with his 
bill. The worst inns were in London, 
and the tradition has been handed down. 
But the ostlers, Harrison confesses, did 
sometimes cheat in the feed, and they 
with the tapsters and chamberlains were 
in league (and the 'landlord was not 
always above suspicion) with highway- 
men outside, to ascertain if the traveller 
carried any valuables ; so that when he 
left the hospitable inn he was quite likely 

88 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

to be stopped on the highway and re- 
lieved of his money. The highwayman 
was a conspicuous character. One of the 
most romantic of these gentry at one 
time was a woman named Mary Frith, 
born in 1585, and known as Mall Cut- 
Purse. She dressed in male attire, was 
an adroit fencer, a bold rider, and a 
staunch royalist ; she once took two 
hundred gold jacobuses from the Parlia- 
mentary General Fairfax on Hounslow 
Heath. She is the chief character in 
Middleton's play of the " Roaring Girl "; 
and after a varied life as a thief, cut-purse, 
pickpocket, highwayman, trainer of ani- 
mals, and keeper of a thieves' " fence," she 
died in peace at the age of seventy. To 
return to the inns, Fyner Morrison, a 
traveller in 161 7, sustains all that Harri- 
son says of the inns as the best and 
cheapest in the world, where -the guest 
shall have his own pleasure. No sooner 

89 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

does he arrive than the servants run to 
him — one takes his horse, another shows 
him his chamber and lights his fire, a 
third pulls off his boots. Then come the 
host and hostess to inquire what meat 
he will choose, and he may have their 
company if he like. He shall be offered 
music while he eats, and if he be solitary 
the musicians will give him good-day 
with music in the morning. In short, 
" a man cannot more freely command 
at home, in his own house, than he may 
do in his inn." 

The amusements of the age were often 
rough, but certainly more moral than 
they were later; and although the thea- 
tres were denounced by such reformers 
as Stubbes as seminaries of vice, and 
disapproved by Harrison, they were bet- 
ter than after the Restoration, when the 
plays of Shakespeare were out of fash- 
ion. The Londoners went for amuse- 
90 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

ment to the Bankside, or South Side of 
the Thames, where were the famous 
Paris Gardens, much used as a rendez- 
vous by gallants ; and there were the 
places for bear and bull baiting ; and 
there were the theatres — the Paris Gar- 
dens, the Swan, the Rose, the Hope, 
and the Globe. The pleasure -seekers 
went over usually in boats, of which 
there were said to be four thousand ply- 
ing between banks ; for there was only 
one bridge, and that was crowded with 
houses. All distinguished visitors were 
taken over to see the gardens and the 
bears baited by dogs ; the queen herself 
went, and perhaps on Sunday, for Sun- 
day was the great day, and Elizabeth is 
said to have encouraged Sunday sports, 
she had been (we read) so much hunted 
on account of religion ! These sports 
are too brutal to think of ; but there are 
amusing accounts of lion-baiting both by 

91 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

bears and dogs, in which the beast who 
figures so nobly on the escutcheon near- 
ly always proved himself an arrant cow- 
ard, and escaped away as soon as he 
could into his den, with his tail between 
his legs. The spectators were once much 
disgusted when a lion and lioness, with 
the dog that pursued them, all ran into 
the den, and, like good friends, stood 
very peaceably together looking out at 
the people. 

The famous Globe Theatre, which was 
built in 1599, was burned in 1613, and 
in the fire it is supposed were consumed 
Shakespeare's manuscripts of his plays. 
It was of wood (for use in summer 
only), octagon shaped, with a thatched 
roof, open in the centre. The daily per- 
formance here, as in all theatres, was at 
three o'clock in the afternoon, and boys 
outside held the horses of the gentlemen 
who went in to the play. When thea- 

92 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

tres were restrained, in 1600, only two 
were allowed, the Globe and the Fort- 
une, which was on the north side, on 
Golden Lane. The Fortune was fifty- 
feet square within, and three stories 
high, with galleries, built of wood on a 
brick foundation, and with a roof of tiles. 
The stage was forty-three feet wide, and 
projected into the middle of the yard (as 
the pit was called), where the ground- 
lings stood. To one of the galleries ad- 
mission was only twopence. The young 
gallants used to go into the yards and 
spy about the galleries and boxes for 
their acquaintances. In these theatres 
there was a drop-curtain, but little or no 
scenery. Spectators had boxes looking 
on the stage behind the curtain, and 
they often sat upon the stage with the 
actors; sometimes the actors all remain- 
ed upon the stage during the whole play. 
There seems to have been great famil- 

93 



' THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

iarity between the audience and the act- 
ors. Fruits in season, apples, pears, and 
nuts, with wine and beer, were carried 
about to be sold, and pipes were smoked. 
There was neither any prudery in the 
plays or the players, and the audiences 
in behavior were no better than the 
plays. 

The actors were all men. The fe- 
male parts were taken usually by boys, 
but frequently by grown men, and when 
Juliet or Desdemona was announced, 
a giant would stride upon the stage. 
There is a story that Kynaston, a hand- 
some fellow, famous in female charac- 
ters, and petted by ladies of rank, once 
kept Charles I. waiting while he was be- 
ing shaved before appearing as Evadne 
in " The Maid's Tragedy." The innova- 
tion of women on the stage was first in- 
troduced by a French company in 1629, 
but the audiences would not tolerate it, 

94 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

and hissed and pelted the actresses off 
the stage. But thirty years later wom- 
en took the place they have ever since 
held ; when the populace had once ex- 
perienced the charm of a female Juliet 
and Ophelia, they would have no other, 
and the rage for actresses ran to such 
excess at one time that it was a fashion 
for women to take the male parts as well. 
But that was in the abandoned days 
of Charles II. Pepys could not control 
his delight at the appearance of Nell 
Gwynne, especially " when she comes 
like a young gallant, and hath the mo- 
tions and carriage of a spark the most 
that ever I saw any man have. It makes 
me, I confess, admire her." The acting 
of Shakespeare himself is only a faint 
tradition. He played the ghost in 
" Hamlet," and Adam in " As You Like 
It." William Oldys says (Oldys was an 
antiquarian who was pottering about in 

95 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

the first part of the eighteenth century, 
picking up gossip in coffee-houses, and 
making memoranda on scraps of paper 
in book -shops) Shakespeare's brother 
Charles, who lived past the middle of 
the seventeenth century, was much in- 
quired of by actors about the circum- 
stances of Shakespeare's playing. But 
Charles was so old and weak in mind 
that he could recall nothing except the 
faint impression that he had once seen 
" Will " act a part in one of his own 
comedies, wherein, being to personate a 
decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, 
and appeared so weak and drooping and 
unable to walk that he was forced to be 
supported and carried by another per- 
son to a table, at which he was seated 
among some company who were eating, 
and one of them sang a song. And 
that was Shakespeare ! 

The whole Bankside, with its taverns, 
96 




N^ ^X oHciuatia tuuus i^ortd<ne/nkffW. 

THE SWAN THEATRE, 1 596 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

play-houses, and worse, its bear pits and 
gardens, was the scene of roystering and 
coarse amusement. And it is surprising 
that plays of such sustained moral great- 
ness as Shakespeare's should have been 
welcome. 

The more private amusements of the 
great may well be illustrated by an ac- 
count given by Busino of a masque (it 
was Ben Jonson's " Pleasure Reconciled 
to Virtue ") performed at Whitehall on 
Twelfth-night, 1617. During the play, 
twelve cavaliers in masks, the central 
figure of whom was Prince Charles, chose 
partners, and danced every kind of dance, 
until they got tired and began to flag ; 
whereupon King James, " who is nat- 
urally choleric, got impatient, and shout- 
ed aloud, ' Why don't they dance ? 
What did you make me come here for? 
Devil take you all, dance !' On hear- 
ing this, the Marquis of Buckingham, 

G 97 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

his majesty's most favored minion, im- 
mediately sprang forward, cutting a 
score of lofty and very minute capers, 
with so much grace and agility that he 
not only appeased the ire of his angry 
sovereign, but moreover rendered him- 
self the admiration and delight of every- 
body. The other masquers, being thus 
encouraged, continued successively ex- 
hibiting their powers with various ladies, 
finishing in like manner with capers, 
and by lifting their goddesses from the 
ground. . . . The prince, however, ex- 
celled them all in bowing, being very 
exact in making his obeisance both to 
the king and his partner ; nor did we ever 
see him make one single step out of time 
— a compliment which can scarcely be 
paid to his companions. Owing to his 
youth, he has not much wind as yet, 
but he nevertheless cut a few capers 
very gracefully." The prince then went 

98 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

and kissed the hand of his serene parent, 
who embraced and kissed him tenderly. 
When such capers were cut at White- 
hall, we may imagine what the revelry 
was in the Bankside taverns. 

The punishments of the age were not 
more tender than the amusements were 
refined. Busino saw a lad of fifteen led 
to execution for stealing a bag of cur- 
rants. At the end of every month, be- 
sides special executions, as many as 
twenty-five people at a time rode through 
London streets in Tyburn carts, singing 
ribald songs, and carrying sprigs of rose- 
mary in their hands. Everywhere in 
the streets the machines of justice were 
visible — pillories for the neck and hands, 
stocks for the feet, and chains to stretch 
across, in case of need, and stop a mob. 
In the suburbs were oak cages for noc- 
turnal offenders. At the church doors 
might now and then be seen women en- 

99 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

veloped in sheets, doing penance for their 
evil deeds. A bridle, something like a 
bit for a restive horse, was in use for the 
curbing of scolds ; but this was a later 
invention than the cucking-stool, or 
ducking-stool. There is an old print of 
one of these machines standing on the 
Thames's bank : on a wheeled platform 
is an upright post with a swinging beam 
across the top, on one end of which the 
chair is suspended over the river, while 
the other is worked up and down by a 
rope ; in it is seated a light sister of the 
Bankside, being dipped into the unsav- 
ory flood. But this was not so hated by 
the women as a similar discipline — be- 
ing dragged in the river by a rope after 
a boat. 

Hanging was the common'punishment 
for felony, but traitors and many other 
offenders were drawn, hanged, bowelled, 
and quartered; nobles who were traitors 

IOO 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

usually escaped with having their heads 
chopped off only. Torture was not prac- 
tised ; for, says Harrison, our people de- 
spise death, yet abhor to be tormented, 
being of frank and open minds. And 
" this is one cause why our condemned 
persons do go so cheerfully to their 
deaths, for our nation is free, stout, 
hearty, and prodigal of life and blood, 
and cannot in any wise digest to be used 
as villains and slaves." Felony covered 
a wide range of petty crimes — breach of 
prison, hunting by night with painted or 
masked faces, stealing above forty shil- 
lings, stealing hawks' eggs, conjuring, 
prophesying upon arms and badges, 
stealing deer by night, cutting purses, 
counterfeiting coin, etc. Death was 
the penalty for all these offences. For 
poisoning her husband a woman was 
burned alive ; a man poisoning an- 
other was boiled to death in water 

IOI 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

or oil ; heretics were burned alive ; 
some murderers were hanged in chains; 
perjurers were branded on the fore- 
head with the letter P ; rogues were 
burned through the ears ; suicides were 
buried in a field with a stake driven 
through their bodies ; witches were 
burned or hanged ; in Halifax thieves 
were beheaded by a machine almost ex- 
actly like the modern guillotine; scolds 
were ducked ; pirates were hanged on 
the sea-shore at low-water mark, and 
left till three tides overwashed them ; 
those who let the sea-walls decay were 
staked out in the breach of the banks, 
and left there as parcel of the foun- 
dation of the new wall. Of rogues — 
that is, tramps and petty thieves — the 
gallows devoured three to four hun- 
dred annually, in one place or another ; 
and Henry VIII. in his time did hang 
up as many as seventy-two thousand 

102 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

rogues. Any parish which let a thief 
escape was fined. Still the supply held 
out. 

The legislation against vagabonds, 
tramps, and sturdy beggars, and their 
punishment by whipping, branding, etc., 
are too well known to need comment. 
But considerable provision was made 
for the unfortunate and deserving poor 
— poor-houses were built for them, and 
collections taken up. Only sixty years 
before Harrison wrote there were few 
beggars, but in his day he numbers 
them at ten thousand ; and most of 
them were rogues, who counterfeited 
sores and wounds, and were mere thieves 
and caterpillars on the commonwealth. 
He names twenty-three different sorts 
of vagabonds known by cant names, 
such as " ruffers," " uprightmen," " prig- 
gers," "fraters," " palliards," "Abrams," 
" dummerers"; and of women," demand- 
103 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

ers for glimmer or fire," " mortes," 
" walking mortes," " doxes," " kinching 
coves." 

London was esteemed by its inhabi- 
tants and by many foreigners as the 
richest and most magnificent city in 
Christendom. The cities of London 
and Westminster lay along the north 
bank in what seemed an endless stretch; 
on the south side of the Thames the 
houses were more scattered. But the 
town was mostly of wood, and its rapid 
growth was a matter of anxiety. Both 
Elizabeth and James again and again 
attempted to restrict it by forbidding 
the erection of any new buildings with- 
in the town, or for a mile outside ; and 
to this attempt was doubtless due the 
crowded rookeries in the city. They 
especially forbade the use of wood in 
house-fronts and windows, both on ac- 
count of the danger from fire, and be- 
104 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

cause all the timber in the kingdom, 
which was needed for shipping and 
other purposes, was being used up in 
building. They even ordered the pull- 
ing down of new houses in London, 
Westminster, and for three miles around. 
But all efforts to stop the growth of the 
city were vain. 

London, according to the Venetian 
Busino, was extremely dirty. He did 
not admire the wooden architecture ; the 
houses were damp and cold, the stair- 
cases spiral and inconvenient, the apart- 
ments " sorry and ill connected." The 
wretched windows, without shutters, he 
could neither open by day nor close by 
night. The streets were little better 
than gutters, and were never put in 
order except for some great parade. 
Hentzner, however, thought the streets 
handsome and clean. When it rained 
it must have been otherwise. There 
105 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

was no provision for conducting away 
the water; it poured off the roofs upon 
the people below, who had not as yet 
heard of the Oriental umbrella; and the 
countryman, staring at the sights of the 
town, knocked about by the carts, and 
run over by the horsemen, was often 
surprised by a douche from a conduit 
down his back. And, besides, people 
had a habit of throwing water and slops 
out of the windows, regardless of pass- 
ers-by. 

The shops were small, open in front, 
when the shutters were down, much like 
those in a Cairo bazaar, and all the 
goods were in sight. The shopkeepers 
stood in front and cried their wares, 
and besought customers. Until 1568 
there were but few silk shops in Lon- 
don, and all those were kept by women. 
It was not till about that time that 
citizens' wives ceased to wear white knit 
106 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

woollen caps, and three-square Minever 
caps with peaks. In the beginning of 
Elizabeth's reign the apprentices (a 
conspicuous class) wore blue cloaks in 
winter and blue gowns in summer; un- 
less men were threescore years old, it 
was not lawful to wear gowns lower 
than the calves of the legs, but the 
length of cloaks was not limited. The 
journeymen and apprentices wore long 
daggers in the daytime at their backs 
or sides. When the apprentices at- 
tended their masters and mistresses in 
the night they carried lanterns and can- 
dles, and a great long club on the neck. 
These apprentices were apt to lounge 
with their clubs about the fronts of 
shops, ready to take a hand in any 
excitement — to run down a witch, or 
raid an objectionable house, or tear 
down a tavern of evil repute, or spoil 
a playhouse. The high - streets, espe- 
107 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

cially in winter-time, were annoyed by 
hourly frays of sword and buckler men ; 
but these were suddenly suppressed 
when the more deadly fight with rapier 
and dagger came in. The streets were 
entirely unlighted and dangerous at 
night, and for this reason the plays at 
the theatres were given at three in the 
afternoon. 

About Shakespeare's time many new 
inventions and luxuries came in : masks, 
muffs, fans, periwigs, shoe-roses, love- 
handkerchiefs (tokens given by maids 
and gentlewomen to their favorites), 
heath -brooms for hair-brushes, scarfs, 
garters, waistcoats, flat-caps; also hops, 
turkeys, apricots, Venice glass, tobacco. 
In 1524, and for years after, was used 
this rhyme : * 

" Turkeys, Carpes, Hops : Piccarel, and beere, 
Came into England : all in one year." 
10S 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

There were no coffee-houses as yet, for 
neither tea nor coffee was introduced 
till about 1661. Tobacco was first made 
known in England by Sir John Haw- 
kins in 1565, though not commonly 
used by men and women till some years 
after. It was urged as a great medicine 
for many ills. Harrison says, 1573, "In 
these days the taking in of the smoke 
of the Indian herb called ' Tabaco,' by 
an instrument formed like a little ladle, 
whereby it passeth from the mouth 
into the head and stomach, is greatly 
taken up and used in England, against 
Rewmes and some other diseases en- 
gendered in the lungs and inward parts, 
and not without effect." Its use spread 
rapidly, to the disgust of James I. and 
others, who doubted that it was good 
for cold, aches, humors, and rheums. 
In 1614 it was said that seven thousand 
houses lived by this trade, and that 
109 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

^"399,375 a year was spent in smoke. 
Tobacco was even taken on the stage. 
Every base groom must have his pipe ; 
it was sold in all inns and ale-houses, 
and the shops of apothecaries, grocers, 
and chandlers were almost never, from 
morning till night, without company 
still taking, of tobacco. 

There was a saying on the Continent 
that " England is a paradise for women, 
a prison for servants, and a hell or pur- 
gatory for horses." The society was 
very simple compared with the complex 
condition of ours, and yet it had more 
striking contrasts, and was a singular 
mixture of downrightness and artifici- 
ality; plainness and rudeness of speech 
went with the utmost artificiality of 
dress and manner. It is curious to 
note the insular, not to say provincial, 
character of the people even three cen- 
turies ago. When the Londoners saw 
no 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

a foreigner very well made or particu- 
larly handsome, they were accustomed 
to say, " It is a pity he is not an ENGLISH- 
MAN." It is pleasant, I say, to trace 
this " certain condescension " in the 
good old times. Jacob Rathgeb (1592) 
says the English are magnificently 
dressed, and extremely proud and over- 
bearing ; the merchants, who seldom go 
unto other countries, scoff at foreigners, 
who are liable to be ill-used by street 
boys and apprentices, who collect in 
immense crowds and stop the way. Of 
course Cassandra Stubbes, whose mind 
was set upon a better country, has little 
good to say of his countrymen: "As 
concerning the nature, propertie, and 
disposition of the people they be desir- 
ous of new fangles, praising things past, 
contemning things present, and covet- 
ing after things to come. Ambitious, 
proud, light, and unstable, ready to be 
in 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

carried away with every blast of wind." 
The French paid back with scorn the 
traditional hatred of the English for 
the French. Perlin (1558) finds the 
people proud and seditious, with bad 
consciences and unfaithful to their 
word — " in war unfortunate, in peace 
unfaithful"; and there was a Spanish 
or Italian proverb : " England, good 
land, bad people." But even Perlin 
likes the appearance of the people : 
" The men are handsome, rosy, large, 
and dexterous, usually fair-skinned ; the 
women are esteemed the most beau- 
tiful in the world, white as alabaster, 
and give place neither to Italian, Flem- 
ish, nor German ; they are joyous, cour- 
teous, and hospitable (de bon recueil)." 
He thinks their manners, however, lit- 
tle civilized : for one thing, they have 
an unpleasant habit of eructation at the 
table (car iceux routent a la table sans 
112 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

honie & ignominie)', which recalls Chau- 
cer's description of the Trumpington f 
miller's wife and daughter : — 

" Men might her rowtyng hearen a forlong, 
The wenche routeth eek par companye." 

Another inference as to the table man- 
ners of the period is found in Coryat's 
" Crudities " (161 1). He saw in Italy gen- 
erally a curious custom of using a little 
fork for meat, and whoever should take 
the meat out of the dish with his fingers 
would give offence. And he accounts for 
this peculiarity quite naturally : " The 
reason of this their curiosity is, because 
the Italian cannot by any means indure 
to have his dish touched with fingers, 
seeing all mens fingers are not alike 
cleane." Coryat found the use of the 
fork nowhere else iri Christendom, and 
when he returned, and, oftentimes in 
h 113 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

England, imitated the Italian fashion, 
his exploit was regarded in a humorous 
light. Busino says that fruits were sel- 
dom served at dessert, but that the 
whole population were munching them 
in the streets all day long, and in the 
places of amusement; and it was an 
amusement to go out into the orchards 
and eat fruit on the spot, in a sort of 
competition of gormandize between the 
city belles and their admirers. And he 
avers that one young woman devoured 
twenty pounds of cherries, beating her 
opponent by two pounds and a half. 

All foreigners were struck with the 
English love of music and drink, of ban- 
queting and good cheer. Perlin notes 
a pleasant custom at table: during the 
feast you hear more than a hundred 
times, " Drink ion" (he loves to air his 
English), that is to say, " Je m'en vois 
boyre a toy." You respond, in their 

114 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

language, " Iplaigin " ; that is to say, 
" Je vous plege." If you thank them, 
they say in their language, "God tanque 
artelay" ; that is, " Je vous remercie de 
bon coeur." And then, says the artless 
Frenchman, still improving on his Eng- 
lish, you should respond thus : "Bigod, 
sol drink ion agoud oin." At the great 
and princely banquets, when the pledge 
went round and the heart's desire of 
lasting health, says the chronicler, " the 
same was straight wayes knowne, by 
sound of Drumme and Trumpet, and 
the cannon's loudest voyce." It was 
so in Hamlet's day: — 

"And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish 
down, 
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out 
The triumph of his pledge." 

According to Hentzner (1598), the 
English are serious, like the Germans, 
115 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

and love show and to be followed by 
troops of servants wearing the arms of 
their masters ; they excel in music and 
dancing, for they are lively and active, 
though thicker of make than the French; 
they cut their hair close in the middle 
of the head, letting it grow on either 
side ; " they are good sailors, and bet- 
ter pyrates, cunning, treacherous, and 
thievish"; and, he adds, with a touch 
of satisfaction, " above three hundred 
are said to be hanged annually in Lon- 
don." They put a good deal of sugar 
in their drink; they are vastly fond of 
great noises, firing of cannon, beating of 
drums, and ringing of bells, and when 
they have a glass in their heads they go 
up into some belfry, and ring the bells 
for hours together, for the sake of exer- 
cise. Perlin's comment is that men are 
hung for a trifle in England, and that 
r ou will not find many lords whose par- 
116 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

ents have not had their heads chopped 
off. 

It is a pleasure to turn to the simple 
and hearty admiration excited in the 
breasts of all susceptible foreigners by 
the English women of the time. Van 
Meteren, as we said, calls the women 
beautiful, fair, well dressed, and modest. 
To be sure, the wives are, their lives 
only excepted, entirely in the power of 
their husbands, yet they have great lib- 
erty; go where they please; are shown 
the greatest honor at banquets, where 
they sit at the upper end of the table 
and are first served ; are fond of dress 
and gossip and of taking it easy ; and 
like to sit before their doors, decked out 
in fine clothes, in order to see and be 
seen by the passers-by. Rathgeb also 
agrees that the women have much more 
liberty than in any other place. When 
old Busino went to the Masque at 
117 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Whitehall, his colleagues kept exclaim- 
ing, " Oh, do look at this one — oh, do 
see that ! Whose wife is this ? — and that 
pretty one near her, whose daughter is 
she?" There was some chaff mixed in, 
he allows, some shrivelled skins and 
devotees of S. Carlo Borromeo, but the 
beauties greatly predominated. 

In the great street pageants, it was 
the beauty and winsomeness of the Lon- 
don ladies, looking on, that nearly drove 
the foreigners wild. In 1606, upon the 
entry of the king of Denmark, the chron- 
icler celebrates " the unimaginable num- 
ber of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, 
and other delicate dames, filling the win- 
dows of every house with kind aspect." 
And in 1638, when Cheapside was all 
alive with the pageant of the entry of 
the queen mother, " this miserable old 
queen," as Lilly calls Marie de Medicis 
(Mr.. Furnivall reproduces an old cut of 
118 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

the scene), M. de la Serre does not try 
to restrain his admiration for the pretty- 
women on view: only the most fecund 
imagination can represent the content 
one has in admiring the infinite number 
of beautiful women, each different from 
the other, and each distinguished by 
some sweetness or grace to ravish the 
heart and take captive one's liberty. No 
sooner has he determined to yield to 
one than a new object of admiration 
makes him repent the precipitation of 
his judgment. 

And all the other foreigners were in 
the like case of " goneness." Kiechel, 
writing in 1585, says, "Item, the women 
there are charming, and by nature so 
mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever 
beheld, for they do not falsify, paint, or 
bedaub themselves as in Italy or other 
places" ; yet he confesses (and here is 
another tradition preserved) " they are 
119 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

somewhat awkward in their style of 
dress." His second " item" of gratitude is 
a Netherland custom that pleased him — 
whenever a foreigner or an inhabitant 
went to a citizen's house on business, 
or as a guest, he was received by the 
master, the lady, or the daughter, and 
"welcomed " (as it is termed in their 
language) ; "he has a right to take them 
by the arm and to kiss them, which is 
the custom of the country ; and if any 
one does not do so, it is regarded and 
imputed as ignorance and ill -breeding 
on his part." Even the grave Erasmus, 
when he visited England, fell easily into 
this pretty practice, and wrote with un- 
theological fervor of the " girls with 
angel faces," who were " so kind and 
obliging." "Wherever you come," he 
says, " you are received with a kiss by 
all ; when you take your leave you are 
dismissed with kisses ; you return, kisses 
1 20 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

are repeated. They come to visit you, 
kisses again ; they leave you, you kiss 
them all round. Should they meet you 
anywhere, kisses in abundance : in fine, 
wherever you move there is nothing but 
kisses" — a custom, says this reformer, 
who has not the fear of Stubbes before 
his eyes, " never to be sufficiently com- 
mended." 

We shall find no more convenient op- 
portunity to end this part of the social 
study of the age of Shakespeare than 
with this naive picture of the sex which 
most adorned it. Some of the details 
appear trivial ; but grave history which 
concerns itself only with the actions of 
conspicuous persons, with the manoeu- 
vres of armies, the schemes of politics, 
the battles of theologies, fails signally 
to give us the real life of the people by 
which we judge the character of an age. 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 



CHAPTER III 

WHEN we turn from France to Eng- 
land in the latter part of the sixteenth 
and the beginning of the seventeenth 
century, we are in another atmosphere ; 
we encounter a literature that smacks 
of the soil, that is as varied, as racy, 
often as rude, as human life itself, and 
which cannot be adequately appreciated 
except by a study of the popular mind 
and the history of the time which pro- 
duced it. 

" Voltaire," says M. Guizot, " was the 
first person in France who spoke of 
Shakespeare's genius ; and although he 
spoke of him merely as a barbarian gen- 
ius, the French public were of the opin- 
ion that he had said too much in his 

122 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

favor. Indeed, they thought it nothing 
less than profanation to apply the words 
genius and glory to dramas which they 
considered as crude as they were coarse." 
Guizot was one of the first of his na- 
tion to approach Shakespeare in the 
right spirit — that is, in the spirit in which 
he could hope for any enlightenment ; 
and in his admirable essay on " Shake- 
speare and His Times," he pointed out 
the exact way in which any piece or 
period of literature should be studied, 
that is worth studying at all. He in- 
quired into English civilization, into the 
habits, manners, and modes of thought 
of the people for whom Shakespeare 
wrote. This method, this inquiry into 
popular sources, has been carried much 
further since Guizot wrote, and it is 
now considered the most remunerative 
method, whether the object of study is 
literature or politics. By it not only is 
123 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

the literature of a period for the first 
time understood, but it is given its just 
place as an exponent of human life and 
a monument of human action. 

The student who takes up Shake- 
speare's plays for the purpose of either 
amusement or cultivation, I would rec- 
ommend to throw aside the whole load 
of commentary, and speculation, and dis- 
quisition, and devote himself to trying 
to find out first what was the London 
and the England of Shakespeare's day, 
what were the usages of all classes of 
society, what were the manners and the 
character of the people who crowded to 
hear his plays, or who denounced them 
as the works of the devil and the allies 
of sin. I say again to the student that 
by this means Shakespeare will become 
a new thing to him, his mind will be 
enlarged to the purpose and scope of 
the great dramatist, and more illumi- 
124 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

nation will be cast upon the plays than 
is received from the whole race of in- 
quisitors into his phrases and critics of 
his genius. In the light of contempo- 
rary life, its visions of empire, its' spirit 
of adventure, its piracy, exploration, and 
warlike turmoil, its credulity and super- 
stitious wonder at natural phenomena, 
its implicit belief in the supernatural, 
its faith, its virility of daring, coarseness 
of speech, bluntness of manner, luxury 
of apparel, and ostentation of wealth, 
the mobility of its shifting society, these 
dramas glow with a new meaning, and 
awaken a profounder admiration of the 
poet's knowledge of human life. 

The experiences of the poet began 
with the rude and rural life of England, 
and when he passed into the presence 
of the court and into the bustle of great 
London in an age of amazing agitation, 
he felt still in his veins the throb of the 
125 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

popular blood. There were classic af- 
fectations in England, there were masks 
and mummeries and classic puerilities 
at court and in noble houses — Eliza- 
beth's court would well have liked to be 
classical, remarks Guizot — but Shake- 
speare was not fettered by classic con- 
ventionalities, nor did he obey the uni- 
ties, nor attempt to separate on the 
stage the tragedy and the comedy of 
life — " immense and living stage," says 
the writer I like to quote because he is 
French, " upon which all things are rep- 
resented, as it were, in their solid form, 
and in the place which they occupied in 
a stormy and complicated civilization. 
In these dramas the comic element is 
introduced whenever its character of re- 
ality gives it the right of admission and 
the advantage of opportune appearance. 
Falstaff appears in the train of Henry 
V., and Doll Tear-Sheet in the train of 
126 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

Falstaff ; the people surround the kings, 
and the soldiers crowd around their gen- 
erals ; all conditions of society, all the 
phases of human destiny appear by 
turns in juxtaposition, with the nature 
which properly belongs to them, and in 
the position which they naturally oc- 
cupy. . . . Thus we find the entire world, 
the whole of human realities, reproduced 
by Shakespeare in tragedy, which, in his 
eyes, was the universal theatre of life 
and truth." 

It is possible to make a brutal picture 
of the England of Shakespeare's day 
by telling nothing that is not true, and 
by leaving out much that is true. M. 
Taine, who has a theory to sustain, does 
it by a graphic catalogue of details and 
traits that cannot be denied ; only there 
is a great deal in English society that he 
does not include, perhaps does not ap- 
prehend. Nature, he thinks, was never 
127 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

so completely acted out. These robust 
men give rein to all their passions, de- 
light in the strength of their limbs like 
carmen, indulge in coarse language, un- 
disguised sensuality, enjoy gross jests, 
brutal buffooneries. Humanity is as 
much lacking as decency. Blood, suf- 
fering, does not move them. The court 
frequents bull and bear baitings ; Eliza- 
beth beats her maids, spits upon a court- 
ier's fringed coat, boxes Essex's ears ; 
great ladies beat their children and their 
servants. " The sixteenth century," he 
says, "is like a den of lions. Amid pas- 
sions so strong as these there is not one 
lacking. Nature appears here in all its 
violence, but also in all its fulness. If 
nothing has been softened, nothing has 
been mutilated. It is the entire man 
who is displayed, heart, mind, body, 
senses, with his noblest and finest aspi- 
rations, as with his most bestial and 
128 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

savage appetites, without the prepon- 
derance of any dominant passion to cast 
him altogether in one direction, to exalt 
or degrade him. He has not become 
rigid as he will under Puritanism. He 
is not uncrowned as in the Restoration." 
He has entered like a young man into 
all the lusty experiences of life, every 
allurement is known, the sweetness and 
novelty of things are strong with him. 
He plunges into all sensations. " Such 
were the men of this time, Raleigh, 
Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII. himself, 
excessive and inconstant, ready for de- 
votion and for crime, violent in good 
and evil, heroic with strange weak- 
nesses, humble with sudden changes of 
mood, never vile with premeditation like 
the roisterers of the Restoration, never 
rigid on principle like the Puritans of 
the Revolution, capable of weeping like 
children, and of dying like men-, often 
i 129 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

base courtiers, more than once true 
knights, displaying constantly, amidst 
all these contradictions of bearing, only 
the overflowing of nature. Thus pre- 
pared, they could take in everything, 
sanguinary ferocity and refined gener- 
osity, the brutality of shameless de- 
bauchery, and the most divine inno- 
cence of love, accept all the characters, 
wantons and virgins, princes and moun- 
tebanks, pass quickly from trivial buf- 
foonery to lyrical sublimities, listen al- 
ternately to the quibbles of clowns and 
the songs of lovers. The drama even, 
in order to satisfy the prolixity of their 
nature, must take all tongues, pompous, 
inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and 
side by side with this vulgar prose ; 
more than this, it must distort its natu- 
ral style and limits, put songs, poetical 
devices in the discourse of courtiers and 
the speeches of statesmen ; bring on the 
130 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

stage the fairy world of opera, as Mid- 
dleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the 
land and sea, with their groves and 
meadows; compel the gods to descend 
upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish 
its world of marvels. No other theatre 
is so complicated, for nowhere else do 
we find men so complete." 

M. Taine heightens this picture in 
generalizations splashed with innumera- 
ble blood-red details of English life and 
character. The English is the most 
warlike race in Europe, most redoubt- 
able in battle, most impatient of slavery. 
" English savages " is what Cellini calls 
them ; and the great shins of beef with 
which they fill themselves nourish the 
force and ferocity of their instincts. To 
harden them thoroughly, institutions 
work in the same groove as nature. 
The nation is armed. Every man is a 
soldier, bound to have arms according to 
131 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

his condition, to exercise himself on 
Sundays and holidays. The State re- 
sembles an army ; punishments must 
inspire terror ; the idea of war is ever 
present. Such instincts, such a history, 
raises before them with tragic severi- 
ty the idea of life ; death is at hand, 
wounds, blood, tortures. The fine pur- 
ple cloaks, the holiday garments, else- 
where signs of gayety of mind, are stain- 
ed with blood and bordered with black. 
Throughout a stern discipline, the axe 
ready for every suspicion of treason ; 
" great men, bishops,achancellor,princes, 
the king's relations, queens, a protector 
kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the 
Tower with their blood; one after the 
other they marched past, stretched out 
their necks ; the Duke of Bucking- 
ham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Cath- 
erine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Ad- 
miral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, 
132 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the 
Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of 
Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps 
of the throne, in the highest ranks of 
honor, beauty, youth, genius ; of the 
bright procession nothing is left but 
senseless trunks, marred by the tender 
mercies of the executioner." 

The gibbet stands by the highways, 
heads of traitors and criminals grin on 
the city gates. Mournful legends mul- 
tiply, church-yard ghosts, walking spir- 
its. In the evening, before bedtime, in 
the vast country houses, in the poor 
cottages, people talk of the coach which 
is seen drawn by headless horses, with 
headless postilions and coachmen. All 
this, with unbounded luxury, unbridled 
debauchery, gloom, and revelry hand in 
hand. " A threatening and sombre fog 
veils their mind like their sky, and joy, 
like the sun, pierces through it and 
i33 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

upon them strongly and at intervals." 
All this riot of passion and frenzy of 
vigorous life, this madness and sorrow, 
in which life is a phantom and destiny 
drives so remorselessly, Taine finds on 
the stage and in the literature of the 
period. 

To do him justice, he finds something 
else, something that might give him a 
hint of the innate soundness of English 
life in its thousands of sweet homes, 
something of that great force of moral 
stability, in the midst of all violence 
and excess of passion and performance, 
which makes a nation noble. " Op- 
posed to this band of tragic figures," 
which M. Taine arrays from the dramas, 
"with their contorted features, brazen 
fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop 
(he says) of timid figures, tender before 
everything, the most graceful and love- 
worthy whom it has been given to man 
134 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

to depict. In Shakespeare you will 
meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desde- 
mona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imo- 
gen ; but they abound also in the oth- 
ers ; and it is a characteristic of the race 
to have furnished them, as it is of the 
drama to have represented them. By 
a singular coincidence the women are 
more of women, the men more of men, 
here than elsewhere. The two natures 
go to its extreme — in the one to bold- 
ness, the spirit of enterprise and resist- 
ance, the warlike, imperious, and unpol- 
ished character ; in the other to sweet- 
ness, devotion, patience, inextinguisha- 
ble affection (hence the happiness and 
strength of the marriage tie), a thing 
unknown in distant lands, and in France 
especially : a woman here gives herself 
without drawing back, and places her 
glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, 
adoration, wishing, and pretending only 
i35 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

to be melted and absorbed daily deeper 
and deeper in him whom she has freely 
and forever chosen." This is an old 
German instinct. The soul in this race 
is at once primitive and serious. Wom- 
en are disposed to follow the noble 
dream called duty. " Thus, supported 
by innocence and conscience, they in- 
troduce into love a profound and up- 
right sentiment, abjure coquetry, vanity, 
and flirtation ; they do not lie, they are 
not affected. When they love they are 
not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are 
binding themselves for their whole life. 
Thus understood, love becomes almost 
a holy thing ; the spectator no longer 
wishes to be malicious or to jest; wom- 
en do not think of their own happi- 
ness, but of that of the loved ones ; 
they aim not at pleasure, but at devo- 
tion." 

Thus far M. Taine's brilliant antith- 
136 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

eses — the most fascinating and most 
dangerous model for a young writer. 
But we are indebted to him for a most 
suggestive study of the period. His 
astonishment, the astonishment of the 
Gallic mind, at what he finds, is a meas- 
ure of the difference in the literature of 
the two races as an expression of their 
life. It was natural that he should 
somewhat exaggerate what he regards 
as the source of this expression, leaving 
out of view, as he does, certain great 
forces and currents which an outside 
observer cannot feel as the race itself 
feels. We look, indeed, for the local 
color of this English literature in the 
manners and habits of the times, traits 
of which Taine has so skilfully made a 
mosaic from Harrison, Stubbes, Stowe, 
Holinshed, and the pages of Reed and 
Drake ; but we look for that which 
made it something more than a mirror 
137 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

of contemporary manners, vices, and 
virtues, made it representative of uni- 
versal men, to other causes and forces — 
such as the Reformation, the immense 
stir, energy, and ambition of the age 
(the result of invention and discovery), 
newly awakened to the sense that there 
was a world to be won and made trib- 
utary ; that England, and, above all 
places on the globe at that moment, 
London, was the centre of a display of 
energy and adventure such as has been 
scarcely paralleled in history. And un- 
derneath it all was the play of an un- 
easy, protesting democracy, eager to 
express itself in adventure, by changing 
its condition, in the joy of living and 
overcoming, and in literature, with small 
regard for tradition or the unities. 

When Shakespeare came up to Lon- 
don with his first poems in his pocket, 
the town was so great and full of mar- 
138 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

vels, and luxury, and entertainment, as 
to excite the astonishment of continen- 
tal visitors. It swarmed with soldiers, 
adventurers, sailors who were familiar 
with all seas and every port, men with 
projects, men with marvellous tales. It 
teemed with schemes of colonization, 
plans of amassing wealth by trade, by 
commerce, by planting, mining, fishing, 
and by the quick eye and the strong 
hand. Swaggering in the coffee-houses 
and ruffing it in the streets were the 
men who had sailed with Frobisher and 
Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Haw- 
kins, and Sir Richard Granville ; had 
perhaps witnessed the heroic death of 
Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen ; had 
served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, 
Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the 
Irish civil war ; had taken part in the 
dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and 
in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled 
139 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

their cups to the union of Scotland with 
England; had suffered shipwreck on the 
Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune 
of war, felt the grip of the Spanish In- 
quisition ; who could tell tales of the 
marvels seen in new-found America and 
the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain 
John Smith, could mingle stories of the 
naiVe simplicity of the natives beyond 
the Atlantic, with charming narratives 
of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of 
the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and 
the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tar- 
tary. There were those in the streets 
who would see Raleigh go to the block 
on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, who 
would fight against King Charles on the 
fields of Newbury or Naseby, Kineton or 
Marston Moor, and perchance see the 
exit of Charles himself from another 
scaffold erected over against the Ban- 
queting House. 

140 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

Although London at the accession of 
James I. (1603) had only about one 
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants 
— the population of England then num- 
bering about five million — ■ it was so 
full of life and activity, that Frederick, 
Duke of Wtirtemberg, who saw it a few 
years before, in 1592, was impressed 
with it as a large, excellent, and mighty 
city of business, crowded with people 
buying and selling merchandise, and 
trading in almost every corner of the 
world, a very populous city, so that one 
can scarcely pass along the streets on 
account of the throng; the inhabitants, 
he says, are magnificently apparelled, 
extremely proud and overbearing, who 
scoff and laugh at foreigners, and no one 
dare oppose them lest the street boys 
and apprentices collect together in im- 
mense crowds and strike to right and left 
unmercifully without regard to persons. 

141 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

There prevailed an insatiable curios- 
ity for seeing strange sights and hearing 
strange adventures, with an eager de- 
sire for visiting foreign countries, which 
Shakespeare and all the play -writers 
satirize. Conversation turned upon the 
wonderful discoveries of travellers, whose 
voyages to the New World occupied 
much of the public attention. The ex- 
aggeration which from love of impor- 
tance inflated the narratives, the poets 
also take note of. There was also a 
universal taste for hazard in money as 
well as in travel, for putting it out on 
risks at exorbitant interest, and the 
habit of gaming reached prodigious ex- 
cess. The passion for sudden wealth 
was fired by the success of the sea- 
rovers, news of which inflamed the im- 
agination. Samuel Kiechel, a merchant 
of Ulrri, who was in London in 1585, 
records that, " news arrived of a Spanish 
142 



• SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

ship captured by Drake, in which it was 
said there were two millions of un- 
coined gold and silver in ingots, fifty 
thousand crowns in coined reals, seven 
thousand hides, four chests of pearls, 
each containing two bushels, and some 
sacks of cochineal — the whole valued 
at twenty-five barrels of gold ; it was 
said to be one year and a half's tribute 
from Peru." 

The passion for travel was at such a 
height that those who were unable to 
accomplish distant journeys, but had 
only crossed over into France and Italy, 
gave themselves great airs on their re- 
turn. " Farewell, monsieur traveller," 
says Shakespeare ; " look, you lisp, and 
wear strange suits ; disable all the ben- 
efits of your own country ; be out of 
love with your nativity, and almost 
chide God for making you that counte- 
nance you are, or I will scarce think 
143 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

you have swam in a gondola." The 
Londoners dearly loved gossip, and in- 
dulged in exaggeration of speech and 
high-flown compliment. One gallant 
says to another : " O, signior, the star 
that governs my life is contentment; 
give me leave to interre myself in your 
arms." " Not so, sir, it is too unworthy 
an enclosure to contain such precious- 
ness ! 

Dancing was the daily occupation 
rather than the amusement at court and 
elsewhere, and the names of dances ex- 
ceeded the list of the virtues — such as 
the French brawl, the pavon, the meas- 
ure, the canary, and many under the 
general titles of corantees, jigs, galliards, 
and fancies. At the dinner and ball given 
by James I. to Juan Fernandez de Ve- 
lasco, Constable of Castile, in 1604, fifty 
ladies of honor, very elegantly dressed 
and extremely beautiful, danced with 
144 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

the noblemen- and gentlemen. Prince 
Henry danced a galliard with a lady, 
" with much sprightliness and modesty, 
cutting several capers in the course of 
the dance "; the Earl of Southampton 
led out the queen, and with three other 
couples danced a brando, and so on, the 
Spanish visitors looking on. When Eliz- 
abeth was old and had a wrinkled face 
and black teeth, she was one day dis- 
covered practising the dance step alone, 
to the sound of a fiddle, determined to 
keep up to the last the limberness and 
agility necessary to impress foreign am- 
bassadors with he_r grace and youth. 
There was one custom, however, -that 
may have made dancing a labor of love : 
it was considered ill -manners for the 
gentleman not to kiss his partner. In- 
deed, in all households, and in all ranks 
of society the guest was expected to 
salute thus all the ladies — a custom 

k 145 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

which the grave Erasmus, who was in 
England in the reign of Henry VIII., 
found not disagreeable. 

Magnificence of display went hand in 
hand with a taste for cruel and barbarous 
amusements. At this same dinner to 
the Constable of Castile, the two buffets 
of the king and queen in the audience- 
chamber, where the banquet was held, 
were loaded with plate of exquisite work- 
manship, rich vessels of gold, agate, and 
other precious stones. The constable 
drank to the king the health of the 
queen from the lid of a cup of agate of 
extraordinary beauty and richness, set 
with diamonds and rubies, praying his 
majesty would condescend to drink the 
toast from the cup, which he did ac- 
cordingly, and then the constable di- 
rected that the cup should remain in 
his majesty's buffet. The constable 
also drank to the queen the health of 
146 




THE BELLMAN OF LONDON, l6l6 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

the king from a very beautiful dragon- 
shaped cup of crystal garnished with 
gold, drinking from the cover, and the 
queen, standing up, gave the pledge 
from the cup itself, and then the consta- 
ble ordered that the cup should remain 
in the queen's buffet. The banquet 
lasted three hours, when the cloth was 
removed, the table was placed upon the 
ground — that is, removed from the dais 
— and their majesties, standing upon it, 
washed their hands in basins, as did the 
others. After the dinner was the ball, 
and that ended, they took their places 
at the windows of a room that looked 
out upon a square, where a platform 
was raised and a vast crowd was assem- 
bled to see the king's bears fight with 
greyhounds. This afforded great amuse- 
ment. Presently a bull, tied to the end 
of a rope, was fiercely baited by dogs. 
After this tumblers danced upon a rope 
147 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

and performed feats of agility on horse- 
back. The constable and his attendants 
were lighted home by half an hundred 
halberdiers with torches, and, after the 
fatigues of the day, supped in private. 
We are not surprised to read that 
on Monday, the 30th, the constable 
awoke with a slight attack of lum- 
bago. 

Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were 
fond of the savage pastime of bear and 
bull baiting. It cannot be denied that 
this people had a taste for blood, took 
delight in brutal encounters, and drew 
the sword and swung the cudgel with 
great promptitude ; nor were they fas- 
tidious in the matter of public execu- 
tions. Kiechel says that when the crim- 
inal was driven in the cart under the 
gallows, and left hanging by the neck 
as the cart moved from under him, his 
friends and acquaintances pulled at his 
148 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

legs in order that he might be strangled 
the sooner. 

When Shakespeare was managing his 
theatres and writing his plays London 
was full of foreigners, settled in the city, 
who no doubt formed part of his au- 
dience, for they thought that English 
players had attained great perfection. 
In 162 1 there were as many as ten thou- 
sand strangers in London, engaged in 
one hundred and twenty- one different 
trades. The poet need not go far from 
Blackfriars to pick up scraps of Ger- 
man and folk-lore, for the Hanse mer- 
chants were located in great numbers 
in the neighborhood of the steel-yard 
in Lower Thames Street. 

Foreigners as well as contempora- 
ry chronicles and the printed diatribes 
against luxury bear witness to the. pro- 
fusion in all ranks, of society and the 
variety and richness in apparel. There 
149 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

was a rage for the display of fine 
clothes. Elizabeth left hanging in her 
wardrobe above three thousand dresses 
when she was called to take that un- 
seemly voyage down the stream, on 
which the clown's brogan jostles the 
queen's slipper. The plays of Shake- 
speare, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, 
and of all the dramatists, are a perfect 
commentary on the fashions of the day, 
but a knowledge of the fashions is nec- 
essary to a perfect enjoyment of the 
plays. We see the fine lady in a gown 
of velvet (the foreigners thought it odd 
that velvet should be worn in the street), 
or cloth of gold and silver tissue, her hair 
eccentrically dressed, and perhaps dyed, 
a great hat with waving feathers, some- 
times a painted face, maybe a mask or a 
muffler hiding all the features except 
the eyes, with a muff, silk stockings, 
high -heeled shoes, imitated from the 
150 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

" chopine " of Venice, perfumed brace- 
lets, necklaces, and gloves — " gloves 
sweet as damask roses" — a pocket- 
handkerchief wrought in gold and sil- 
ver, a small looking-glass pendent at the 
girdle, and a love-lock hanging wantonly 
over the shoulder, artificial flowers at 
the corsage, and a mincing step. " These 
fashionable women, when they are dis- 
appointed, dissolve into tears, weep with 
one eye, laugh with the other, or, like 
children, laugh and cry they can both 
together, and as much pity is to be 
taken of a woman weeping as of a 
goose going barefoot," says old Burton. 
The men had even greater fondness 
for finery. Paul Hentzner, the Bran- 
denburg jurist, in 1598, saw, at the Fair 
of St. Bartholomew, the lord mayor, 
attended by twelve gorgeous aldermen, 
walk in a neighboring field, dressed in 
a scarlet gown, and about his neck a 
151 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

golden chain, to which hung a Golden 
Fleece. Men wore the hair long and flow- 
ing, with high hats and plumes of feath- 
ers, and carried muffs like the women; 
gallants sported gloves on their hats as 
tokens of ladies' favors, jewels and roses 
in the ears, a long love-lock under the 
left ear, and gems in a ribbon round the 
neck. This tall hat was called a " cap- 
atain." Vincentio, in the "Taming of 
the Shrew," exclaims : " O fine villain ! 
A silken doublet ! A velvet hose ! A 
scarlet cloak ! And a capatain hat !" 
There was no limit to the caprice and 
extravagance. Hose and breeches of 
silk, velvet, or other rich stuff, and 
fringed garters wrought of gold or sil- 
ver, worth five pounds apiece, are some 
of the items noted. Burton says, " 'Tis 
ordinary for a gallant to put a thousand 
oaks and an hundred oxen into a suit of 
apparel, to wear a whole manor on his 
152 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

back." Even serving -men and tailors 
wore jewels in their shoes. 

We should note also the magnificence 
in the furnishing of houses, the arras, 
tapestries, cloth of gold and silver, silk 
hangings of many colors, the splendid 
plate on the tables and sideboards. 
Even in the houses of the middle class- 
es the furniture was rich and comforta- 
ble, and there was an air of amenity in 
the chambers and parlors strewn with 
sweet herbs and daily decked with pret- 
ty nosegays and fragrant flowers. Lights 
were placed on antique candelabras, or, 
wanting these at suppers, there were liv- 
ing candle-holders. "Give me a torch," 
says Romeo ; " I'll be a candle-holder, 
and look on." Knowledge of the de- 
tails of luxury of an English home of the 
sixteenth century will make exceedingly 
vivid hosts of allusions in Shakespeare. 

Servants were numerous in great 
153 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

households, a large retinue being a mark 
of gentility, and hospitality was un- 
bounded. During the lord mayor's 
term in London he kept open house, 
and every day any stranger or foreigner 
could dine at his table, if he could find 
an empty seat. Dinner, served at eleven 
in the early years of James, attained a 
degree of epicureanism rivalling dinners 
of the present day, although the guests 
ate with their fingers or their knives, 
forks not coming in till 1611. There 
was mighty eating and swigging at the 
banquets, and carousing was carried to 
an extravagant height, if we may judge 
by the account of an orgy at the king's 
palace in 1606, for the delectation of the 
King and Queen of Denmark, when the 
company and even their majesties aban- 
doned discretion and sobriety, and " the 
ladies are seen to roll about in intoxica- 
tion." 

154 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

The manners of the male population 
of the period, says Nathan Drake, seem 
to have been compounded from the 
characters of the two sovereigns. Like 
Elizabeth, they are brave, magnanimous, 
and prudent ; and sometimes, like James, 
they are credulous, curious, and dissi- 
pated. The credulity and superstition 
of the age, and its belief in the su- 
pernatural, and the sumptuousness of 
masques and pageants at the court and 
in the city, of which we read so much in 
the old chronicles, are abundantly re- 
flected in the pages of Jonson, Shake- 
speare, and other writers. 

The town was full of coffee-houses 
and pleasure -gardens, but, curiously 
enough, the favorite place of public 
parading was the middle aisle of St. 
Paul's Cathedral— " Paul's Walk," as it 
was called — which was daily frequented 
by nobles, gentry, perfumed gallants, 
i55 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

and ladies, from ten to twelve and three 
to six o'clock, to talk on business, pol- 
itics, or pleasure. Hither came, to ac- 
quire the fashions, make assignations, 
arrange for the night's gaming, or shun 
the bailiff, the gallant, the gamester, the 
ladies whose dresses were better than 
their manners, the stale knight, the 
captain out of service. Here Falstaff 
purchased Bardolph. " I bought him," 
says the knight, " at Paul's." The tai- 
lors went there to get the fashions of 
dress, as the gallants did to display 
them, one suit before dinner and an- 
other after. What a study was this 
varied, mixed, flaunting life, this dance 
of pleasure and license before the very 
altar of the church, for the writers of 
satire, comedy, and tragedy ! 

But it is not alone town life and court 
life and the society of the fine folk that 
is reflected in the English drama and 
156 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

literature of the seventeenth century, 
and here is another wide difference be- 
tween it and the French literature of 
the same period ; rural England and the 
popular life of the country had quite as 
much to do in giving tone and color to 
the writings of the time. It is necessary 
to know rural England to enter into the 
spirit of this literature, and to appreciate 
how thoroughly it took hold of life in 
every phase. Shakespeare knew it well. 
He drew from life the country gentle- 
man, the squire, the parson, the pedantic 
school-master who was regarded as half 
conjurer, the yeoman or farmer, the 
dairy maids, the sweet English girls, the 
country louts, shepherds, boors, and 
fools. How he loved a fool ! He had 
talked with all these persons, and knew 
their speech and humors. He had tak- 
en part in the country festivals — May 
Day, Plough Monday, the Sheep Shear- 
157 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

ing, the Morris Dances and Maud Ma- 
rian/ the Harvest Home and Twelfth 
Night. The rustic merry-makings, the 
feasts in great halls, the games on the 
greensward, the love of wonders and of 
marvellous tales, the regard for portents, 
the naive superstitions of the time pass 
before us in his pages. Drake, in his 
" Shakespeare and his Times," gives a 
graphic and indeed charming picture of 
the rural life of this century, drawn 
from Harrison and other sources. 

In his spacious hall, floored with 
stones and lighted by large transom 
windows, hung with coats of mail and 
helmets, and all military accoutrements, 
long a prey to rust, the country squire, 
seated at a raised table at one end, held 
a baronial state and dispensed prodigal 
hospitality. The long table was divided 
into upper and lower messes by a huge 
salt-cellar, and the consequence of the 
158 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

guests was marked by their seats above 
or below the salt. The distinction ex- 
tended to the fare, for wine frequently 
circulated only above the salt, and be- 
low it the food was of coarser quality. 
The literature of the time is full of al- 
lusions to this distinction. But the lux- 
ury of the table and good cooking were 
well understood in the time of Elizabeth 
and James. There was massive eating 
done in those days, when the guests 
dined at eleven, rose from the banquet 
to go to evening prayers, and returned 
to a supper at five or six, which was 
often as substantial as the dinner. Ger- 
vase Markham in his " English House- 
wife," after treating of the ordering of 
great feasts gives directions for " a more 
humble feast of an ordinary proportion." 
This " humble feast," he says, should 
consist for the first course of " sixteen 
full dishes, that is, dishes of meat that 
159 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

are of substance, and not empty, or for 
shew — as thus, for example: first, a 
shield of brawn with mustard ; second- 
ly, a boyl'd capon ; thirdly, a boyl'd 
piece of beef ; fourthly, a chine of beef 
rosted ; fifthly, a neat's tongue rosted ; 
sixthly, a pig rosted ; seventhly, chewets 
bak'd ; eighthly, a goose rosted; ninthly, 
a swan rosted ; tenthly, a turkey rosted ; 
the eleventh, a haunch of venison rosted ; 
the twelfth, a pasty of venison ; the thir- 
teenth, a kid with a pudding in the bel- 
ly; the fourteenth, an olive-pye; the fif- 
teenth, a couple of capons ; the six- 
teenth, a custard or dowsets. Now to 
these full dishes may be added sallets, 
fricases, quelque choses, and devised 
paste, as many dishes more as will make 
no less than two and thirty dishes, which 
is as much as can conveniently stand 
on one table, and in one mess ; and 
after this manner you may proportion 
160 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

both your second and third course, 
holding fullness on one half the dishes, 
and shew in the other, which will be 
both frugal in the splendor, content- 
ment to the guest, and much pleasure 
and delight to the beholders." After 
this frugal repast it needed an interval 
of prayers before supper. 

The country squire was a long-lived 
but not always an intellectual animal. 
He kept hawks of all kinds, and all sorts 
of hounds that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, 
and badger. His great hall was com- 
monly strewn with marrow-bones, and 
full of hawks'-perches, of hounds, span- 
iels, and terriers. His oyster-table stood 
at one end of the room, and oysters he 
ate at dinner and supper. At the upper 
end of the room stood a small table 
with a double desk, one side of which 
held a church Bible, the other Fox's 
" Book of Martyrs." He drank a glass 
l 161 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

or two of wine at his meals, put syrup 
of gilly-flower in his sack, and always 
had a tun-glass of small beer standing 
by him, which he often stirred about 
with rosemary. After dinner, with a 
glass of ale by his side he improved his 
mind by listening to the reading of a 
choice passage out of the " Book of 
Martyrs." This is a portrait of one 
Henry Hastings, of Dorsetshire, in Gil- 
pin's " Forest Scenery." He lived to be 
a hundred, and never lost his sight 
nor used spectacles. He got on horse- 
back without help, and rode to the 
death of the stag till he was past four- 
score. 

The plain country fellow, ploughman, 
or clown, is several pegs lower, and de- 
scribed by Bishop Earle as one that 
manures his ground well, but lets him- 
self lie fallow and untilled. His hand 
guides the plough, and the plough his 
162 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

thoughts. His mind is not much dis- 
turbed by objects, but he can fix a half- 
hour's contemplation on a good fat 
cow. His habitation is under a poor 
thatched roof, distinguished from his 
barn only by loop-holes that let out the 
smoke. Dinner is serious work, for he 
sweats at it as much as at his labor, 
and he is a terrible fastener on a piece 
of beef. His religion is a part of his 
copyhold, which he takes from his land- 
lord and refers it wholly to his dis- 
cretion, but he is a good Christian in 
his way, that is, he comes to church in 
his best clothes, where he is capable 
only of two prayers — for rain and fair 
weather. 

The country clergymen, at least those 
of the lower orders, or readers, were dis- 
tinguished in Shakespeare's time by the 
appellation " Sir," as Sir Hugh, in the 
" Merry Wives," Sir Topas, in " Twelfth 
163 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Night," Sir Oliver, in " As You Like 
It." The distinction is marked between 
priesthood and knighthood when Vista 
says, " I am one that would rather go 
with Sir Priest than Sir Knight." The 
clergy were not models of conduct in 
the days of Elizabeth, but their position 
excites little wonder when we read that 
they were often paid less than the cook 
and the minstrel. 

There was great fondness in cottage 
and hall for merry tales of errant knights, 
lovers, lords, ladies, dwarfs, friars, thieves, 
witches, goblins, for old stories told by 
the fireside, with a toast of ale on the 
hearth, as in Milton's allusion 

" — to the nut-brown ale, 
With stories told of many a feat." 

A designation of winter in " Love's 
Labour 's Lost " is 

■' When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl." 
164 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

To " turne a crab " is to roast a wild 
apple in the fire in order to throw it 
hissing hot into a bowl of nut-brown 
ale, into which had been put a toast 
with some spice and sugar. Puck de- 
scribes one of his wanton pranks : 

" And sometimes I lurk in a gossip's bowl, 
In very likeness of a roasted crab, 
And when she drinks against her lips I 
bob." 

I love no roast, says John Still, in 
" Gammer Gurton's Needle," 

" I love no rost, but a nut-browne toste, 
And a crab layde in the fyre ; 
A lytle bread shall do me stead, 
Much bread I not desire." 

In the bibulous days of Shakespeare, 
the peg tankard, a species of wassail or 
wish-health bowl, was still in use. In- 
troduced to restrain intemperance, it 
became a cause of it, as every drinker 
165 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

was obliged to drink down to the peg. 
We get our expression of taking a man 
"a peg lower," or taking him ''down a 
peg," from this custom. 

In these details I am not attempting 
any complete picture of the rural life at 
this time, but rather indicating by illus- 
trations the sort of study which illu- 
minates its literature. We find, indeed, 
if we go below the surface of man- 
ners, sober, discreet, and sweet domestic 
life, and an appreciation of the virtues. 
Of the English housewife, says Gervase 
Markham, was not only expected sanc- 
tity and holiness of life, but " great 
modesty and temperance, as well out- 
wardly as inwardly. She must be of 
chaste thoughts, stout courage, patient, 
untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleas- 
ant, constant in friendship, full of good 
neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not 
frequent therein, sharp and quick of 

1 66 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret 
in her affairs, comportable in her coun- 
sels, and generally skillful in the worthy 
knowledges which do belong to her 
vocation." This was the mistress of 
the hospitable house of the country 
knight, whose chief traits were loyalty 
to church and state, a love of festivity, 
and an ardent attachment to field sports. 
His well-educated daughter is charm- 
ingly described in an exquisite poem by 
Drayton : 

" He had, as antique stories tell, 
A daughter cleaped Dawsabel, 

A maiden fair and free ; 
And for she was her father's heir, 
Full well she ycond the leir 

Of mickle courtesy. 

" The silk well couth she twist and twine, 
And make the fine march-pine, 
And with the needle work : 
167 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

And she couth help the priest to say 
His matins on a holy day, 
And sing a psalm in Kirk. 

"She wore a frock of frolic green 
Might well become a maiden queen, 

Which seemly was to see ; 
A hood to that so neat and fine, 
In color like the columbine, 

Ywrought full featously. 

" Her features all as fresh above 
As is the grass that grows by Dove, 

And lythe as lass of Kent. 
Her skin as soft as Lemster wool, 
As white as snow on Peakish Hull, 

Or swan that swims in Trent. 

"This maiden in a morn betime 
Went forth when May was in the prime 

To get sweet setywall, 
The honey-suckle, the harlock, 
The lily, and the lady-smock, 

To deck her summer hall." 

How late such a simple and pretty 

168 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

picture could have been drawn to life 
is uncertain, but by the middle of the 
seventeenth century the luxury of the 
town had penetrated the country, even 
into Scotland. The dress of a rich farm- 
er's wife is thus described by Dunbar. 
She had "a robe of fine scarlet, with 
a white hood, a gay purse and gingling 
keys pendant at her side from a silken 
belt of silver tissue ; on each finger she 
wore two rings, and round her waist 
was bound a sash of grass-green silk, 
richly embroidered with silver." 

Shakespeare was the mirror of his 
time in things small as well as great. 
How far he drew his characters from 
personal acquaintances has often been 
discussed. The clowns, tinkers, shep- 
herds, tapsters," and such folk, he prob- 
ably knew by name. In the Duke of 
Manchester's " Court and Society from 
Elizabeth to Anne "is a curious sug- 
169 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

gestion about Hamlet. Reading some 
letters from Robert, Earl of Essex, to 
Lady Rich, his sister, the handsome, 
fascinating, and disreputable Penelope 
Devereaux, he notes, in their humorous 
melancholy and discontent with man- 
kind, something in tone and even lan- 
guage which suggests the weak and 
fantastic side of Hamlet's mind, and 
asks if the poet may not have conceived 
his character of Hamlet from Essex, 
and of Horatio from Southampton, his 
friend and patron. And he goes on to 
note some singular coincidences. Essex 
was supposed by many to have a good 
title to the throne. In person he had 
his father's beauty and was all that 
Shakespeare has described the Prince 
of Denmark. His mother had been 
tempted from her duty while her noble 
and generous husband was alive, and 
this husband was supposed to have 
170 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

been poisoned by her and her para- 
mour. After the father's murder the 
seducer had married the guilty mother. 
The father had not perished without 
expressing suspicion of foul play against 
himself, yet sending his forgiveness to 
his faithless wife. There are many other 
agreements in the facts of the case and 
the incidents of the play. The relation 
of Claudius to Hamlet is the same as 
that of Leicester to Essex : under pre- 
tence of fatherly friendship he was sus- 
picious of his motives, jealous of his 
actions ; kept him much in the country 
and at college ; let him see little of his 
mother, and clouded his prospects in 
the world by an appearance of benig- 
nant favor. Gertrude's relations with 
her son Hamlet, were much like those of 
Lettice with Robert Devereaux. Again, 
it is suggested, in his moodiness, in his 
college learning, in his love for the the- 
171 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

atre and the players, in his desire for 
the fiery action for which his nature was 
most unfit, there are many kinds of 
hints calling up an image of the Danish 
Prince. 

This suggestion is interesting in the 
view that we find in the characters of 
the Elizabethan drama not types and 
qualities, but individuals strongly pro- 
jected, with all their idiosyncrasies and 
contradictions. These dramas touch our 
sympathies at all points, and are repre- 
sentative of human life to-day, because 
they reflected the human life of their 
time. This is supremely true of Shake- 
speare, and almost equally true of Jonson 
and many of the other stars of that 
marvellous epoch. In England as well 
as in France, as we have said, it was the 
period of the classic revival ; but in 
England the energetic reality of the 
time was strong enough to break the 
172 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

classic fetters, and to use classic learn- 
ing-for modern purposes. The English 
dramatists, like the French, used classic 
histories and characters. But two things 
are to be noted in their use of them. 
First, that the characters and the play 
of mind and passion in them are thor- 
oughly English and of the modern time. 
And second, and this seems at first a 
paradox, they are truer to the classic 
spirit than the characters in the contem- 
porary French drama. This results from 
the fact that they are truer to the 
substance of things, to universal human 
nature, while the French seem to be in 
great part an imitation, having root 
neither in the soil of France nor Atti- 
ca. M. Guizot confesses that France, 
in order to adopt the ancient models, 
was compelled to limit its field in some 
sort to one corner of human existence. 
He goes on to say that the present 
i73 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

" demands of the drama pleasures and 
emotions that can no longer be supplied 
by the inanimate representation of a 
world that has ceased to exist. The 
classic system had its origin in the life 
of the time ; that time has passed away; 
its image subsists in brilliant colors in its 
works, but can no more be reproduced." 
Our own literary monuments must rest 
on other ground. " This ground is not 
the ground of Corneille or Racine, nor is it 
that of Shakespeare ; it is our own ; but 
Shakespeare's system, as it appears to me, 
may furnish the plans according to which 
genius ought now to work. This sys- 
tem alone includes all those social condi- 
tions and those general and diverse feel- 
ings, the simultaneous conjuncture and 
activity of which constitute for us at 
the present day the spectacle of human 
things." 

That is certainly all that any one can 
174 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

claim for Shakespeare and his fellow- 
dramatists. They cannot be models in 
form any more than Sophocles and Eu- 
ripides ; but they are to be followed 
in making the drama, or any literature, 
expressive of its own time, while it is 
faithful to the emotions and feeling of 
universal human nature. And herein, 
it seems to me, lies the broad distinction 
between most of the English and French 
literature of the latter part of the six- 
teenth and the beginning of the seven- 
teenth centuries. Perhaps I may be 
indulged in another observation on this 
topic, touching a later time. Notwith- 
standing the prevalent notion that the 
French poets are the sympathetic heirs 
of classic culture, it appears to me that 
they are not so imbued with the true 
classic spirit, art, and mythology as some 
of our English poets, notably Keats and 
Shelley. 

i75 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

Ben Jonson was a man of extensive 
and exact classical erudition ; he was a 
solid scholar in the Greek and Roman 
literatures, in the works of the philoso- 
phers, poets, and historians. He was 
also a man of uncommon attainments 
in all the literary knowledge of his time. 
In some of his tragedies his classic 
learning was thought to be ostenta- 
tiously displayed, but this was not true 
of his comedy, and on the whole he was 
too strong to be swamped in pseudo- 
classicism. For his experience of men 
and of life was deep and varied. Before 
he became a public actor and dramatist, 
and served the court and fashionable 
society with his entertaining, if pedantic, 
masques, he had been student, trades- 
man, and soldier ; he had travelled in 
Flanders and seen Paris, and wandered 
on foot through the length of England. 
London he knew as well as a man 
176 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

knows his own house and club, the 
comforts of its taverns, the revels of 
lords and ladies, the sports of Bartholo- 
mew Fair, and the humors of suburban 
villages ; all the phases, language, crafts, 
professions of high and low city life 
were familiar to him. And\in his com- 
edies, as Mr. A. W. Ward pertinently 
says, his marvellously vivid reproduction 
of manners is unsurpassed by any of his 
contemporaries. "The age lives in his 
men and women, his country gulls and 
town gulls, his imposters and skeldering 
captains, his court ladies and would-be 
court ladies, his puling poetasters and 
whining Puritans, and, above all, in the 
whole ragamuffin rout of his Barthol- 
omew Fair. Its pastimes, fashionable 
and unfashionable, its games and vapors 
and jeering, its high-polite courtships 
and its pulpit-shows, its degrading su- 
perstitions and confounding hallucina- 
m 177 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

tions, its clubs of naughty ladies and its 
offices of lying news, its taverns and its 
tobacco shops, its giddy heights and its 
meanest depths — all are brought before 
us by our author." 

No, he was not swamped by classicism, 
but he was affected by it, and just here, 
and in that self- consciousness which 
Shakespeare was free from, and which 
may have been more or less the result 
of his classic erudition, he fails of being 
one of the universal poets of mankind. 
The genius of Shakespeare lay in his 
power to so use the real and individual 
facts of life as to raise in the minds of 
his readers a broader and nobler con- 
ception of human life than they had 
conceived before. This is creative genius ; 
this is the idealist dealing faithfully with 
realistic material ; this is, as we should 
say in our day, the work of the artist 
as distinguished from the work of the 
178 . 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

photographer. It may be an admirable 
but it is not the highest work of the 
sculptor, the painter, or the writer, that 
does not reveal to the mind that comes 
into relation with it something before 
out of his experience and beyond the 
facts either brought before him or with 
which he is acquainted. 

What influence Shakespeare had upon 
the culture and taste of his own time 
and upon his immediate audience would 
be a most interesting inquiry. We 
know what his audiences were. He 
wrote for the people, and the theatre in 
his day was a popular amusement for 
the multitude, probably more than it 
was a recreation for those who enjoyed 
the culture of letters. A taste for letters 
was prevalent among the upper class, 
and indeed was fashionable among both 
ladies and gentlemen of rank. In this 
the court of Elizabeth set the fashion. 
179 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

The daughter of the duchess was taught 
not only to distil strong waters, but to 
construe Greek. When the queen was 
translating Socrates cfr Seneca, the maids 
-of honor found it convenient to affect at 
least a taste for the classics. For the 
nobleman and the courtier an intimacy 
with Greek, Latin, and Italian was es- 
sential to "good form." But the taste 
for erudition was mainly confined to the 
metropolis or the families who fre- 
quented it, and to persons of rank, and 
did not pervade the country or the 
middle classes. A few of the country 
gentry had some pretension to learning, 
but the majority cared little except for 
hawks and hounds, gaming and drinking; 
and if they read it was some old chron- 
icle, or story of knightly adventure, 
"Amadis de Gaul," or a stray play- 
book, or something like the " History of 
Long Meg of Westminster," or perhaps 
1 80 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

a sheet o( news. To read and write 
were still rare accomplishments in the 
country, and Dogberry expressed a 
common notion when he said reading 
and .writing come by nature. Sheets of 
news had become common in the town 
in James's time, the first newspaper 
being the English Mercury, which ap- 
peared in April, 1588, and furnished 
food for Jonson's satire in his " Staple 
of News." His accusation has a famil- 
iar sound when he says that people had 
a " hunger and thirst after published 
pamphlets of news, set out every Satur- 
day, but made all at home, and no 
syllable of truth in them." 

Though Elizabeth and James were 
warm patrons of the theatre, the court 
had no such influence over the plays 
and players as had the court in Paris at 
the same period. The theatres were 
built for the people, and the audience 
181 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

included all classes. There was a dis- 
tinction between what were called pub- 
lic and private theatres, but the public 
frequented both. The Shakespeare the- 
atres, at which his plays were exclusively 
performed, were the Globe, called public, 
on the Bankside, and the Blackfriars, 
called private, on the City side, the one 
for summer, the other for winter per- 
formances. The Blackfriars was smaller 
than the Globe, was roofed over, and 
needed to be lighted with candles, and 
was frequented more by the better class 
than the more popular Globe. There is 
no evidence that Elizabeth ever attend- 
ed the public theatres, but the companies 
were often summoned to play before 
her in Whitehall, where the appoint- 
ments and scenery were much better 
than in the popular houses. 

The price of general admission to 
the Globe and Blackfriars was six- 
182 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

pence, at the Fashion Theatre two- 
pence, and at some of the inferior thea- 
tres one penny. The boxes at the 
Globe were a shilling, at the Blackfriars 
one -and -six. The usual net receipts 
of a performance were from nine to ten 
pounds, and this was about the sum 
that Elizabeth paid to companies for 
a performance at Whitehall, which was 
always in the evening and did not in- 
terfere with regular hours. The the- 
atres opened as early as one o'clock 
and not later than three in the after- 
noon. The crowds that filled the pit 
and galleries early, to secure places, 
amused themselves variously before the 
performance began : they drank ale, 
smoked, fought for apples, cracked nuts, 
chaffed the boxes, and a few read the 
cheap publications of the day that were 
hawked in the theatre. It was a rough 
and unsavory audience in pit and gal- 
183 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

lery, but it was a responsive one, and 
it enjoyed the acting with little help to 
illusion in the way of scenery. In fact, 
scenery did not exist, as we understand 
it. A board inscribed with the name 
of the country or city indicated the 
scene of action. Occasionally movable 
painted scenes were introduced. The 
interior roof of the stage was painted 
sky-blue, or hung with drapery of that 
tint, to represent the heavens. But 
when the idea of a dark, starless night 
was to be imposed, or tragedy was to 
be acted, these heavens were hung with 
black stuffs, a custom illustrated in 
many allusions in Shakespeare, like that 
in the line, 

" Hung be the heavens in black, yield day to 
night." 

To hang the stage with black was to 
prepare it for tragedy. The costumes 
of the players were sometimes less nig- 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

gardly than the furnishing of the stage, 
for it was an age of rich and picturesque 
apparel, and it was not difficult to pro- 
cure the cast-off clothes of fine gentle- 
men for stage use. But there was no 
lavishing of expense. I am recalling 
these details to show that the amuse- 
ment was popular and cheap. The or- 
dinary actors, including the boys and 
men who took women's parts (for 
women did not appear on the stage 
till after the' Restoration) received 
only about five or six shillings a week 
(for Sundays and all), and the first-class 
actor, who had a share in the net re- 
ceipts, would not make more than 
ninety pounds a year. The ordinary 
price paid for a new play was less than 
seven pounds ; Oldys, on what authority 
is not known, says that Shakespeare 
received only five pounds for " Hamlet." 
The influence of the theatre upon 
185 



THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM 

politics, contemporary questions that 
interested the public, and morals, was 
early recognized in the restraints put 
upon representations by the censorship, 
and in the floods of attacks upon its 
licentious and demoralizing character. 
The plays of Shakespeare did not es- 
cape the most bitter animadversions of 
the moral reformers. We have seen 
how Shakespeare mirrored his age, but 
we have less means of ascertaining what 
effect he produced upon the life of his 
time. Until after his death his influ- 
ence was mainly direct, upon the play- 
goers, and confined to his auditors. He 
had been dead seven years before his 
plays were collected. However the peo- 
ple of his day regarded him, it is safe to 
say that they could not have had any 
conception of the importance of the 
work he was doing. They were doubt- 
less satisfied with him. It was a great 
186 



SHAKESPEARE WROTE 

age for romances and story-telling, and 
he told stories, old in new dresses, but 
he was also careful to use contempo- 
rary life, which his hearers understood. 

It is not to his own age, but to those 
following, and especially to our own 
time, that we are to look for the shap- 
ing and enormous influence upon hu- 
man life of the genius of this poet. 
And it is measured not by the libraries 
of comments that his works have called 
forth, but by the prevalence of the lan- 
guage and thought of his poetry in all 
subsequent literature, and by its en- 
trance into the current of common 
thought and speech. It may be safely 
said that the English-speaking world 
and almost every individual of it are 
different from what they would have 
been if Shakespeare had never lived. Of 
all the forces that have survived out of 
his creative time, he is one of the chief. 
187 



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HOWELLS. 

FROM THE BOOKS OF LAURENCE HUTTON. 
CONCERNING ALL OF US. By Thomas Went- 

WORTH HlGGINSON. 

THE WORK OF JOHN RUSKIN. By Charles 

Waldstein. 

PICTURE AND TEXT. Ey Herny James. With 

Illustrations. 

Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

§ZT" For sale by all booksellers, or -urill be mailed by the pub- 
lishers* *>os£aj?e /><repaia, on receipt of the price. 



By GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 



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LRE N '26 



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